[AlfaWolph]

..which I don't think takes anything away from it. It was still clever in implementation, concept, and now we can just add viral campaign to the list.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the people at Metafilter were on it from the start. I don't know if that says anything about liberal arts and social science types being more cynical and skeptical or if the science and technical crowd types here are just easily entranced by the technical implementation of something and don't see the forest for the trees. It's probably both.

[gamble]

Something about this story seemed to hit a nerve on HN. It didn't get nearly the same traction on Reddit or Metafilter.

[smhinsey]

Metafilter has a long and storied history of uncovering these sorts of things, so it's not a total surprise to me that they were on this pretty quickly, although I admit I skipped that post.