Widespread cheating reveals a bigger problem. These sites are commonly used for self promotion but they lack a mechanism to give everyone a minimum amount of attention so they can see if there is any interest in their product/content.
I wouldn't discount voter ringers as unethical cheaters just because they don't follow some lazily contrived rules set up by people who don't have promotional problems.
The technology behind these up/down vote sites really hasn't moved and they will run into ever bigger problems as people get accustomed to them and learn to cheat bigtime just as content farms learned to cheat search engines. Actually content farms cheat HN pretty well already. They spew out so much crap people never learn what quality content looks like and upvote the crap.
I wouldn't discount voter ringers as unethical cheaters just because they don't follow some lazily contrived rules set up by people who don't have promotional problems.
The technology behind these up/down vote sites really hasn't moved and they will run into ever bigger problems as people get accustomed to them and learn to cheat bigtime just as content farms learned to cheat search engines. Actually content farms cheat HN pretty well already. They spew out so much crap people never learn what quality content looks like and upvote the crap.