I disagree. I think you could make a strong argument that there is some effective use of technique 1 and 3 going on. Forum sliding and topic dilution. 

Read over the last full page or two. It's just nattering back and forth. It's about 90% noise and a few percent of content. The techniques are definitely alive and well here, maybe not in an obviously insidious way but they're here. 

Aves, agree with that mo comment. 

Treborjim, mazan's English really did go through a transformation there ... 

Now that I go through that warning post again we may have seen technique 4 too. Information collection. On this forum you can still find the evidence of this in the survey done of members share counts. Now management, ir, whoever knows exactly how much power we have (or had).