Quote - While I agree with the substance of Peng's posts, your point there is something I wouldn't be surprised at.  There are some awfully petty and small minded people who seem to get very worked up over what are pieces of software for making pictures.  

A bit silly, if you ask me.  

 

I can agree to that in theory, and  definitely agree with your theory as to the motivation behind it. It's amazing just how abundant such evidence is for the latter theory, too.

OTOH, carrying the first theory through, and it stops making sense. Intellectual exercise time:  

As a business (any business), what use would one have for such information? The vast majority of it would be worthless, misconstrued (that is, heard wrong), made-up for some reason or other, unrelated, petty, or is otherwise unreliable stuff. Call it a rough estimate of 98% of the total.  The tiny fraction that actually has any use? The majority of that is readily available online (call it 1.5% of total), and the final tiny fraction that is actually useful information would be mostly tactical, with the juicy (and accurate!) strategic stuff making up maybe 0.1% of the inbound volume.

So basically, having some network o' spies, even volunteer ones, would still mean spending time and resources sorting through the chaff to get at those one or two juicy kernels of wheat.  Let's consider it a parallel to finding something on the order of Boris Vallejo, in the Rendo galleries, with a crappy search func- err, yeah, that.

Oh, and then you have to spend time verifying the information, then deciding on whether or not to base one's business decisions on it. Note that the petty BS like who posts what in which forum would have been filtered out long, long, long ago.

In all, in general it is too much work for too little reward, for any business that wants to remain financially profitable.