this is a scam. threats of litigation. withholding of property. unlawful contracts.
you used "mob mentality". that's a big red flag to me. are you perhaps the owner of that small business?
The evidence of this being a scam is that someone posted an e-mail the owner allegedly sent. That e-mail could be a total sham, or it could be exaggerated, or there could be a huge other side of the story.
There are absolutely scammers out there, and this business might be one of them. There's no hard evidence either way, though.
- "Anyone who is defending this child molester was never molested as a child."
- "Anyone who is defending this racist has never been the victim of prejudice."
Some events overtrain our minds, such that we can never emotionally react to them in a genuinely rational way again. However, we can stop ourselves from doing this, by holding fast to the one principle that has always, always worked: Innocent until proven guilty, please.
I think you really need to reexamine your perspective as it will seriously make working with other people on projects quite difficult.
To put that another way, in an isomorphic situation with forged evidence of, say, spousal abuse (pretending that that has some relevance to HN for some reason, and wouldn't get flagged), do you think the votes here would go the same way on your, the parent's, and the grandparent's comments, even if there were many people here who had been victims of spousal abuse (like I am assuming that there are many people here who have been conned by a business at some point)?
On the other hand, when a magazine was shown to have lifted content and then told the original author she should be grateful for the portfolio assist, HN did pile on. In that case, the evidence of wrongdoing was clear and widespread: an admission by the publisher that she'd lifted content, links to the original which was clearly older, and links to content lifted from other publications. This led to the opposite pattern in comments, with evidence being highly upvoted and "let's not jump to conclusions" sitting at only a few points.
I don't think "sympathy for small business" is the driving force. I think it's a focus on evidence rather than narrative (which happens to help us avoid that particular cognitive bias.) We are, after all, Hacker News, and the hacker ethos is one of making stuff that works, A/B testing, and following the evidence.
if($customer->has_paid && $review->score < 4) {
delete_review();
}Seems like the right sort of solution to me.
Random example: http://mfisurvey.marketforce.com/raisingcanes/
"They quoted me $155 and ended up charging me over $500 and STILL wanted me to pay for some dumb protection service at $85 per year. AND THEY DID NOT EVEN FULLY RECOVER THE FULL DATA!"
"John retrieved the images as promised, but once he did he held them hostage demanding more money!"
"This place is extremely unprofessional. They charged WAY more than the original quote, and then demanded payment before returning my item. Also, they accused me of "harassing" them when I called to discuss the difference in price from the quoted cost."
"Wish I'd skipped them. My laptop hard drive crashed and I needed to recover some Word & Excel docs. A month later they haven't recovered all of my data and are completely unresponsive to calls/emails. Now I'm out $460, I don't have the data that I paid to get back, and John still has my hard drive, so I'm stuck."
"The data recovery was more expensive than quoted by Tekserve (by $200). Actual price was way over estimate (by $400). Communications were unclear. Terms were nebulous. Service was always late."
And where was the withholding of property?
> As of this time, I still haven't gotten my circuit board back.