phony postings, good-neutral-bad? [long]

Wicked Ways of the Web - Trolls Good??? Neutral?? or Bad? and for whom ...

There seems to be some social engineering rearing it's head in forums recently an i would ask what you all think about this and where it may be going. The info was found on a page concerning multiple web forum posting program designed to increase traffic.

So, roll the drums, & begin the pitch from someone who would supply legions of trolls, sock puppets and lurkers to such as a car forums like this one or anything else for cash along with a tidy rational for the services used by forum owners:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
on ezine and a bunch of other sites:
"The reason that most forums don't succeed online initially is because they lack a user base. A forum's value to users increases with each user already registered as an active user. This is called the network effect. The more users there are on a forum, the more useful, varied, and dense the information is. If there are only a few users, a user is not likely to sign up and join because any queries, questions, discussions, debates, or arguments he might want to start would fizzle out.

"One solution to this is to hire the services of a forum posting service in addition to a steady stream of visitor traffic. One such forum posting service is Forum Posters Australia. Forum Posters Australia is a service that jump starts your community's activity and encourages new users, real users, to sign up. With a constant stream of visitor traffic, the potential users will see the value in joining a forum that has a lot of registered users, posts, and user activity. The conversion rate will be higher. Conversion rate is just a measurement of the amount of people that see your website versus the amount that take an action like signing up. It is also called a conversion ratio, a cornerstone of Internet marketing.

"In order for a community to persist online, it must have a lot of visitors that provide an ongoing value proposition to potential customers. Once the potential customers are getting to your site in full swing from another method, outside the forum posting service, then your website has a real chance of success.

"The activities of Forum Posters Australia can be hired out to get your community into active swing and supercharge it, turning it from a nowhere location to a somewhere location on the web. By building a niche community in a niche market, you can be one of the only forums. In such niche markets, it is valuable to hire a forum posting team because the stream of real visitors may just be a trickle in a niche market. If the community were left to start on its own with just that trickle, then the community would never get started because each person that came to the site would be disinterested in signing up.

"A community's value increases not just with visitors, but with the perception of visitors. The perception of visitors, the illusion, can get real valuable customers to sign up and become a part of the community, never knowing that they were duped into joining a community that had a steady base of fake forum posters. However, because the posts, threads, and conversations will be legitimate, no harm will be done. Your potential customers will actually get some benefit out of working with your hired forum posting service because these conversations can be just as valuable as real conversations between forum posters that discovered your site through a natural method. This is the method that most big forums today use to get started up."
-30-
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
ezine article

what say you , a trend to be aware of and ignore passively, or time to call bullshit on duplicity and social engineering tactics.