I'm not sure how this is a particularly different policy from any mega-corporation. I've never seen any great support on online forums from the company in question. If you're having a wi-fi problem, follow the company's support potocol, which in this case is probably go to the genius bar and get it fixed. Where you'll probably have a better experience than if you tried to get help for a competing product.
I wish company forums did have more interaction than they do, but it's certainly not an Apple thing. They are universally "community" run and company censored.
This is only the first point of his post. The second, and more important, point being that Apple employees are actively deleting messages in which users explain how one can exerce their warranty rights to get the iPhone replaced.
I know it's a profoundly different area of the industry, but it's reasonably common practice in videogames (PC gaming, at least) for official spokespeople, even designers, and very occasionally developers, to engage with the community, on at least the general zeitgeist of its concerns.
And even in more "traditional" and supposedly conservative industries... I could find some references for you but I don't think I'd need to given how widely-covered some of these have been, of the customer support PR coups that have been achieved over social media in general (primarily Twitter and Reddit; at least in my personal experience). It is obviously less structured than an archived, time-ordered, hierarchical, and easily-searchable forum designed for permanence, and I don't have the slightest sense of the proportion of customer issues that go /un/-addressed in this manner.
But viewed through this lens... customer support is public politics. It's totally understandable that Apple would want to both maintain their image of aloofness from non-visionary matters, and deliberately avoid validating the existence of problems with their products in a public forum, which would also contradict a decades-long and painstakingly-crafted image. But it's also totally okay if the community or some segment of it makes a stink in the hopes of shifting the PR calculation.
I wish company forums did have more interaction than they do, but it's certainly not an Apple thing. They are universally "community" run and company censored.