I want to expand on this a bit.

Consider the modus operandi of David Johnston's Bitangels/Mastercoin mafia.

They rope in mostly young and inexperienced developers via their hackathons that promise (contracts worth up to) large sums of money, then make sure any vaguely interesting idea that emerges gets bolted on to a otherwise-useless appcoin.

They then spend a considerable amount of time promoting the resulting pump and dump. After all possible value has been extracted from the idea they simply move on like a plague of locusts to the next idea. (when was the last time you heard a progress update from APICoin?)

This process generates a large number of accomplices of varying degrees of culpability:

• The developers who get pulled into the system now have their reputations invested in the viability of the appcoin, not to mention the sunk costs of spending so much time on the projects
• The aspiring Bitcoin journalists who helped to promote the appcoins and who accepted advertisement money don't want to admit they participated in something shady without doing any due diligence
• The conference organizers who accepted money from the appcoin project don't want to admit that there are too many Bitcoin conferences to only accept clean money
• The people who bought into the IPO and didn't get out soon enough don't want to admit their money is gone
• The businesses who court outside investment know that some of the investors can't tell the difference between legitimate opportunities and P&D scams, and that many of the investors they court get involved in some of those schemes. They don't want the investors to become spooked and leave the space entirely.

I know of at least two different employees of Bitcoin companies who were required to censor their personal social media accounts on pain of termination because they were being publicly critical of scammy startups. In both cases, their employers cited common investors between the two companies as the reason why criticism could not be allowed.

I also heard one episode of a popular Bitcoin podcast where one of the hosts expressed some regret for accepting work from a project that turned out to be a scam and both other hosts immediately leaped into action to stop her attempt to assume some accountability (lest her example illuminate their lack of assuming similar accountability, presumably).

These bad ideas spread like viruses, and it's increasingly difficult to find somebody who isn't infected to some degree or another.