I also don't know why HN is so upset about people willing to help out in the threads. The way I see it is, if you talk about your product on HN, inevitably someone will remember they have a support inquiry while HN is open, and ask it there instead of over email. Since employees are probably reading HN, they are naturally going to want to answer or say they escalated there. I don't think it's some sort of scam, just what any reasonable person would do.
It's become a YC cliche, that the way to get support for any issue is to get a complaint upvoted to the top of a thread. People used to talk about "Collison installs", which are real-use product demos that are so slick your company founder (in this case Stripe's 'pc) can just wander around installing your product for people to evangelize it; there should be another Collison term for decisively resolving customer support issues by having the founder drop into a thread, and I think that's the vibe people are reacting to here.
