I'm going to chalk this one up to growing pains. Dealing with spam is a really difficult problem, especially in unusual cases like this. Their response definitely wasn't great, but if it was causing them a lot of trouble to keep up with the spam on that account, this might be a drain on their likely-small team and detrimental to everyone else using the site by taking their attention. This is a startup, not an enormous company we're talking about. Maybe project moderation tools would have helped with this, but they might not want project starters to be able to silence commenters. Before you bring out your pitchforks, realize that this is a small team of real people trying to do something huge, and have a million other concerns that they have to take care of, and this is a very hard and probably relatively infrequent problem.
Yup. There's something ineffably hard about customer service. Ask Craig Newmark, who still does it full time. My company's most important competitive advantage is customer service. My secret to providing superior customer service is treating my customers like they are human beings. It works because my customers are in fact human beings. I think this works because I own the company and do some of my own support. You lose a human element when your customer support starts being done by unempowered minions that don't have incentives in place to treat customers like real people.
Yeah, I still do a lot of my own customer service too, and I think it's had a big effect. It can also be really draining, though, so I understand why people want to shield themselves from it, and I can sympathize with a company that just doesn't want to deal with someone's outsized personal drama.
