It's pretty rare for "bad customer service" to cost people tens of thousands in lost revenue and pretty severe reputation loss for their business. I've had some bad customer service before, but it never set me back months or years of progress before.
So while I agree this is basically an issue of bad customer service, it is at the most egregious level. If your mortgage company started foreclosing on your home incorrectly, or the title company said "new phone who dis?" when you tried to sell your home, it wouldn't just be called "bad customer service". These are life altering issues.
And these companies just don't care. A little public shaming of the people walking into work of a company like that could do some good.
> If your mortgage company started foreclosing on your home incorrectly, or the title company said "new phone who dis?" when you tried to sell your home [...]
Right, but that's a totally different situation and not one that would involve protest (it'd involve lawyers/lawsuits and court).
The problem with public shaming is the presumption that the people doing the shaming are in the absolute moral/ethical right (which is always subjective) and that anyone affiliated with the decided perpetrator (in this case, Stripe) are at fault. That's the problem with showing up at their office as an angry mob of people. An uninvolved worker could come out of the building and the mob could start shouting and attacking them even though they're a low-level employee who had zero involvement.
Doing it online is hypothetically better, but again, it just introduces a lot of unnecessary negative energy that is very unlikely to remedy the actual problem (and in extreme cases can still spill over into reality).
I agree that threatening someone's livelihood is bad, but in this specific example my immediate question would be "what were you or your customers doing?" If it's even remotely in the grey area of the TOS (however foolish/restrictive that may be), the owner has a responsibility to consider alternatives up front and communicate the potential for those to be necessary to customers.
So while I agree this is basically an issue of bad customer service, it is at the most egregious level. If your mortgage company started foreclosing on your home incorrectly, or the title company said "new phone who dis?" when you tried to sell your home, it wouldn't just be called "bad customer service". These are life altering issues. And these companies just don't care. A little public shaming of the people walking into work of a company like that could do some good.