Let me first just say that I love this thread. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to say something about this- I would have done so myself but I could never find a way to put it, so thank you for posting this, you've taken the words right out of my mouth.
Since I agree with the majority of what the others have said I'll make my post brief, and instead add on to a couple things.
Someone earlier mentioned that a lot of the userbase is younger, yes? If you consider the lives of most younger people nowadays it's not really all that surprising. For example, back when I was super active here I was quite a bit younger, and that's when my behavior was like that. I did it because I didn't have a whole lot of friends around that time (both offline and online), and so I wound up on games like these. After a couple months of puttering around ingame I ended up on the forum. I spent some time observing people, and saw that there was a certain few who were very well-liked and had a lot of friends. Now, being the 'lonely' person I was, I thought, "Wow! This user has so many friends, and people talk about them a lot! What can I do to become like that?" Over time I learned that that kind of recognition was earned by posting on help-threads whether you know what you're talking about or not and spamming threads with an insincere compliment that you just posted on another thread. So, you see, some of this is taught to newbies... or so that's what it was like in my circumstance. Not all of them are necessarily fakes, perhaps just looking for friends- not doing so in a very good way, but they mean well. I don't know what to say about the rest of them, though. Some people are just nasty.