First, he's doing the morally right thing by calling them out after a fiasco spanning several months, backed by correspondence.
Second, applying public pressure to get his refund is much better than going to litigious way, unless he seeks damages too (which I believe he doesn't - just wants his refund back).
I get that we are on the Internet and everyone gets a voice, but they should have let their lawyers do the talking. Both companies are run by adults I assume, but both are throwing sand in each other's faces running across the playground, in this case reddit, Twitter and HN. Either party can use this as slander I suppose.
If Robocoin is still making money, this bad PR might go against them for just a bit, but their "success" with others will pass on via word of mouth.
If acting like kids on the Internet has worked well for others in order to get their own back, someone should write up a pretty medium article outlining a proper way to do this for any company.
Disregarding the legal issues, warning other customers of such behavior is pretty much a moral duty - keeping mum, as you propose, would be a shameful behavior and if everyone did that way then we'd have a worse society.
Maybe. But 9/10, we get a hate mob fueled by a one-sided story by someone who feels "offended".
There isn't enough punishment when it's all based on false information. In fact, there's none. If I was the target, I would be personally ruining the lives of the people that started it. It would be my moral imperative.
look at what happened with notch and minecraft. Silly children that couldn't get their own way decided to get the masses sending him shitty and hateful messages, which eventually led to his quitting/selling to microsoft.
I don't think your argument here holds water. Robocoin can't spin this to their advantage. Everyone can read the dialog between the two parties and see what's going on. This is much better way to go about getting reparations than litigation.
I don't see how getting uninformed internet nerd rage on your side is going to somehow be a better fix than an actual legal settlement, which is what most mature companies rely on to fix their business disputes.
Second, applying public pressure to get his refund is much better than going to litigious way, unless he seeks damages too (which I believe he doesn't - just wants his refund back).