Longtime readers and perhaps very perceptive new readers will figure out that I’m fairly cynical about people online. I don’t believe most of what people say on messageboards and if I’m burned by trusting somebody online one time, that’s usually enough. After meeting somebody from online offline I tend to be much more trusting. Bloggers who don’t tell me anything about who they are or what they are up to fit into the instantly suspicious category.

Sorry, there are just too many phonies online. Call me internet battle scarred. I’ve seen too many good people scammed by some loser. I’ve seen fake charity drives, fake help somebody out that is dying when they aren’t really dying, fake, fake, fake.

With this in mind, that’s why I’m not surprised to see this alleged activity this morning about Nvidia via BoingBoing:

Nvidia stands accused of hiring online actors to create dozens of personae in online forums, where they won gamers’ trust by talking about subjects unrelated to Nvidia’s products, and then splurged in an orgy of sock-puppet boosterism of Nvidia’s stuff.

What seems odd to me about this is that Nvidia already has good graphics cards, so why would they need to be out shilling their product further? There are really only two major graphic cards companies: ATI and Nvidia, at least as far as home/small business graphic card purchases. I’ve had trouble getting Nvidia graphic cards working with Linux but been overall pretty happy with them in Windows systems.

If this allegation turns out to be true, I could maybe understand this aggressive marketing activity if there were dozens of graphic cards company, but is that business really this cutthroat that Nvidia would need to do something like this?

In 2006, can’t trust what some stranger on a messageboard says to be without ulterior motives. This would be a total non-issue if these alleged shills had simply disclaimed their affiliation in their tagline or profiles or better yet: both.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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