> You know, if I was invested in eg IPFS I would post night and day in all forums subtle not too obvious hints how great IPFS is (pump) and then I would dump them.
Credibility is much more apparent than you may think on sites like HN/Reddit. Shameless self-promotion without any substance won't get you far.
Fortunately software doesn't live or die on name recognition via random posts on social media but on whether people actually find it useful.
If this was someone's plan to make money on their investments they are wasting their time. Unless, maybe, they are a minor celebrity with a lot of reach.
Disclaimers on whether you own some tokens in a company is of marginal interest to me (authoring news stories is another matter), I'll judge the value of it by the proposition being made. Otherwise I'm pretty sure anyone who's been on the internet for a long enough time knows better than to take any recommendation at face value from comment threads. And being an investor is a sign of confidence, it doesn't automatically mean you are deluded by the idea or are only motivated in pumping it up for a cheap profit.
Either way if someone's plan is to engage in pump and dump schemes they'll always be at a high risk of being in a race to the bottom trying to exit before everyone else with the same half-baked idea of getting rich quick. It's not as clever as you make it out to be. There is always a far higher probability that they were the actual 'bigger fool' in any scheme than they people they hoped to recruit.