[DigitalSea]

I honestly suspected some form of this happening to some extent. I did not realise the extent of the suspected cheating, but it does remind me of the old days of Digg.

I recall Digg had a massive "digg brigade" problem where certain groups of users and particular power users like MrBabyMan would make the homepage on what felt like a daily basis. Solving these kinds of problems is a lot harder than just analysing data and looking for patterns, because sometimes innocent users can get caught up in data.

If solving cheating on social link submission sites was easy, it would have been solved already. Even Reddit suffers from the same issues.

[digi_owl]

Reddit is fudging displayed votes and shadowbanning (the poster can't tell he has been banned) for similar reasons, iirc.

[SSLy]

The shadowbanned poster can tell he has been banned, sut by trying to view their profile as an logged out user. It will give a 404.