I think that you should feel free, bonesjones, to attempt to feel some sympathy and empathy, even if we are talking about online personas.  Probably the vast majority of online personas are just regular people who are participating in this forum to attempt to share information and to attempt to both help and be helped, and these people are going to have meatwagon issues too and feelings.

Just be careful not to get too carried away with your feelings that either you get lured into some kind of scam or maybe you start to believe that a troll/shill is actually a genuine person who is really is genuinely sharing information and experiences rather than just manipulating.    This would be a general suggestion, and I am not saying anything at all about anyone in particular, but just referring to the general dynamic of how we might still have feelings for online personas while keeping some of those feelings at bay.

Of course, misjudgments regarding the character of another person can happen in the real world too, but at least when you are in the real world and looking someone in the eye, there can be some other dynamics and knowledge of the person and maybe even know more details about who they are or have met their family that can help you to figure out if they are being genuine or at least how they are spending their days and what might be motivating them in the meatspace...

Seems that it becomes much easier for some people to become disingenuous in the interwebs and even difficulties to know whether you are interacting with one person or a team or maybe even there is some complex situation that is going underneath the avatar that is difficult to really understand what is behind the avatar, so surely there is a difference between real world and interweb personas, as you likely already know that, too, and truly many of us are increasing getting used to getting to know interweb personas over a number of years, even if we might not have ever met them in the real world, or we may be unsure about whether we would even share information with such a person in the real world (because there might be some thing about their personality that just would not work out so well in the real world, even though we are forced, somewhat, to interact online because we are sharing in the batting around of a topic). 

And, surely at the same time, we are likely prudent to have some skepticisms about the online persona and how much feelings we might develop in regards to our perception of their situation.