Is Matt Cutts manifesting signs of a mental illness?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Jim Munro: I have a question... :)
  
  Is Matt Cutts manifesting signs of a mental illness?
  
  The background to this story can be found here: ;http://agentblackhat.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-bait-matt-cutts/
  
  Maybe I am wrong, I usually am, but that's the only conclusion I can draw from the two lame posts alleged to be from Matt Cutts. What is your point of view?
  
  What do you think he was trying to prove here? What useful purpose has been served? Is terrorism/bullying part of Matt Cutts' job description now?
  
  Can we now expect that the data that Google holds on us will be used for this sort of thing from now on?
  
  Is Matthew Hoey now supposed to be scared?
  
  ...and what do you make of the character "Der" in the comments section of the page linked above? Do you think Matt might also suffering from a split-personality? :)
  
  Nemesis follows hubris and I think this episode has been an indication of extreme hubris.
  
  via +Brent Wildman ;
• 
  Warren Chandler: Interesting question. That does seem a little extreme. Maybe it's Matt's way of telling people that Google is watching you and he wants people to pick up on these things and share such posts to further mask Google's real failings.
  
  Bullying, hubris, or whatever. It's certainly strange behaviour.
  
• 
  Warren Chandler: Further proof, +Jim Munro ;or a little tongue in cheek?
  
  https://plus.google.com/101775690562196390671/posts/FEvHVJSvmCh
• 
  Russell Deasley: Matt Cutts starts to act weird just as Google buys a humanoid robotics company?!? If I smoked pot there might have been something in that. ;
• 
  Chris Butterworth: "Is Matt Cutts manifesting signs of a mental illness?"
  
  Seems a little harsh ;)
  
  They're poking a wasps nest with the intention of getting stung. As for the extent to which the SPAM team went to penalise them, it's hardly surprising. They're messing with Google's business model and making it personal to Matt.
  
  If someone was using negative SEO against your/my/a friends business online, you'd likely go all out to find them. It just so happens that Google's employees are made up of the worlds best software engineers and have full access to the most powerful crawling and indexing tool available.
  
  So what likely seems over the top to us, is a simple click of the mouse to them.
  
  Interesting article though, definately gives you an idea of the level of information they have access to.
• 
  Jim Munro: All well and good, Chris, and you and I are generally in complete agreement but in this one case I don't think a line should be drawn between Negative SEO and blackhats.
  
  Negative SEO is carried out by commercial competitors including big brands and Google could not care less about it.
  
  Blackhats don't need to waste their time with NSEO and I don't think there is an action that Google can take that will have a lasting effect on blackhats.
  
  Blackhats are churn and burn, they don't have to play by the same rules and they are doing better than ever, despite all the grief that has been visited on the working publishers of the internet by Google playing their game of cops and robbers. ;
  
  I think the problem is that Google's premises are not founded on the basics of ethics, integrity and fair play.
  
  Their willing acceptance of collateral damage is a black mark against them.
  
  Knowingly ruining honest people trying to do the right thing seems wasteful and callous to me and all actions carry consequences.
  
  Consider that if they don't rethink and the layer of "quality" continues to be aggressively diminished then maybe the spam underneath might eventually become too hard to filter out.