[jacquesm]

For every good thing that you could create on the internet there are going to be people hell bent on screwing it up.

Your 'friend' and her copycats think they are somehow entitled to that traffic, which in the long run is responsible for the famous eternal September feeling that many websites have.

Gaming the system is like the internet equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture.

I don't care whether it works or not, or whether you consider it justified because her content was good I think it sucks.

If you want to have that traffic start your own social site, promote that and make it work, then feel what it is like to have people come out to game the system and use your knowledge of how such systems can be gamed to put a stop to it.

[terra_t]

It's hard to say.

The toughest problem people have starting community sites is getting the community. Dealing with problem behaviors is something you worry about after you've got the community. Just as casinos hire shills, many community site operators use Mechanical Turk or statistical models to get the ball rolling...

Who knows, we might soon have replicants that are more satisfying to interact with than ordinary humans.

[keefe]

It's the site owner's responsibility to figure this sort of things now. A set of users acting in a cluster is detectable as are aberrant behavior patterns from particular IPs.