Once again, the internet’s collective jaw is agape as something that it shouldn’t be that surprised about: Nvidia apparently hired actors to worm their way into forums and then barf up paragraphs about how great Nvidia’s products are. Shocking. Can you believe that a big business would do something like that to advertise their products in an effort to make more money? I can, and if you can’t, then let me have this guy I don’t know tell you about great it would be to own a Hell Yeah Bitch! .com t-shirt.

Hey pal, do you want the ladies? Hell Yeah Bitch! .com t-shirts are the easy way to have that special someone notice you? Not into the ladies? That’s cool, buy one anyway! Hang it on your wall or wear it to church. There are many great uses! In fact, we hear they make great rags as well. Since the price is so low, you could just buy one for that special occasion and then throw it away! That boss of yours bugging you again, knock him out with a stapler, burry him in your back yard, and then throw the shirt 100% cotton, evidence laden shirt away! Unless your boss is famous, then sell it on e-bay! That’s right, they can even be investments! — “Some That Doesn’t Know Mike”

Obvious jokes aside (I actually don’t make a dime off the t-shirts, I just thought it would be cool if someone bought one.), why is it that the internet population, or at least the blogging population is so amazed and up at arms on this subject? Two things have never been a secret: You can pretty much be whomever you want on the internet, and companies will pretty much do anything to help their bottom line. 1 + 1 = Something else that’s not a secret. Couple those things together with the current advertising craze that is “Viral Marketing” and this non-surprise turns into something that should have almost been expected! Is what Nvidia did a little sleazy? Yeah, of course. Am I being a bit too cynical about this? Maybe. Are you wondering how much exactly a “fake forum guy” gets paid these days? Me too. But really, you can’t look me in the eye (screen) and really tell me you never saw this coming.

So what can we do about this? For starters I think the internet population should pull its head a little farther out of the “sandbox” and stop acting like hippies that can’t believe someone threw their cigar butt on the ground. Yes, we all know the community as a whole is very altruistic, but remember that this community is a major minority of the world. The internet is run and can be accessed by anyone and that includes big corporations. So just try to fix problems right away instead of spending a day or 7 in wondrous disbelief that “something like this can happen!”. Look at the updates on BoingBoing, this isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. As far as actually fixing the problem, I don’t see much you can do about it. You can try to do better checks on your users, but all that’s going to do is piss off new legitimate users and even then a company could just make an offer to an pre-established user and negate the whole process. Sadly, there’s not much anyone can do about an advertiser posing as a “regular user” just like no one has found a good way to stop the 40 year old 300 pound guy from posing as “Ginger the Nympho” on chat rooms. We’ll just have to add this to the stack of stuff that sits in that grey area on the internet where the good and the bad cases of anonymity meet.