I think it's usually useless to debate motivations: either it's unambiguous, in which case there is no debate... or it's not and there will be no resolution. Ultimately what matters is what people do, not what motivates them. If something is explainable as confusion or benign greed, it's prudent to stick with that assumption until facts show otherwise both because it's more likely to be true but also because it has less collateral damage if you're wrong.
As far as the quote-- Your guess is as good as mine as to the intended tone, it's probably a mistake to assume much about it. It can be extremely difficult to figure out the correct tone from text, something I know all too well as someone who finds messages intended to sound playful get received by many as a particularly forceful sermon.
That said, It's easy to be popular with almost any identifiable clique: Just yell the party lines louder than other people, hate on the right enemies, cheer on the right heros. So much so that excessive popularity with an identifiable group can be a red-flag: People who are genuine will usually have some unpopular opinions, they'll usually have better things to do with their time than sing from the hymn book all day long. Bitcoin and the adjacent altcoin ecosystems have been full of bad actors using the popularity play book: Even early on many of the top rated OTC participants were scammers. Plenty of loud twitter voices promoting Bitcoin turned out to only doing it to form a following to sell their scamcoin to... even Craig Wright totally suckered a huge swath of large block bitcoiners by saying what they wanted to hear.
This isn't to say that disagreeable people are more trustworthy, I think the compulsively disagreeable are even more likely to be bad actors. There really just isn't a magic formula to figure out good motivations from bad. But we don't have to-- unless you're shopping for a spouse you don't need to worry about judging people, just consider their actions and your responses.
As far as the quote-- Your guess is as good as mine as to the intended tone, it's probably a mistake to assume much about it. It can be extremely difficult to figure out the correct tone from text, something I know all too well as someone who finds messages intended to sound playful get received by many as a particularly forceful sermon.
That said, It's easy to be popular with almost any identifiable clique: Just yell the party lines louder than other people, hate on the right enemies, cheer on the right heros. So much so that excessive popularity with an identifiable group can be a red-flag: People who are genuine will usually have some unpopular opinions, they'll usually have better things to do with their time than sing from the hymn book all day long. Bitcoin and the adjacent altcoin ecosystems have been full of bad actors using the popularity play book: Even early on many of the top rated OTC participants were scammers. Plenty of loud twitter voices promoting Bitcoin turned out to only doing it to form a following to sell their scamcoin to... even Craig Wright totally suckered a huge swath of large block bitcoiners by saying what they wanted to hear.
This isn't to say that disagreeable people are more trustworthy, I think the compulsively disagreeable are even more likely to be bad actors. There really just isn't a magic formula to figure out good motivations from bad. But we don't have to-- unless you're shopping for a spouse you don't need to worry about judging people, just consider their actions and your responses.