Gaming social news sites has been going on for quite some time now, although I don't see why anyonenwould bother gaming HN- the traffic is minimal and too savvy to click on ads.
As for Digg and reddit- many of you have startups and blogs that are floundering with minimal traffic and revenue.
Instead of complaining and being all up in arms, perhaps you should accept that Digg and reddit have been gamed by numerous entities for years, and learn how to game them for your own benefit. That doesn't mean spamming, it means giving your own quality content an extra push. Back when I did that sort of thing, I got dozens of stories to the Digg and reddit front pages. After receiving, synthetically, with many accounts and proxies, the first hundred or so votes needed to get to the front page, these stories went on to receive thousands of natural, real upvotes. So much for your "algorithms". If you can't beat them, join them.
Getting your friends to vote you up is one thing... getting a network of proxied spam bots to do so is another.
There's a fine line between "giving an extra push" and being downright unethical. I usually try to convince people (on twitter and irc and personally) to upvote my stories when I think they'll be of interest, but I would never actually contrive a script to do that for me.
I'll add that in my experience, the relatively small push of getting a few initial upvotes from friends, even on reddit, is usually enough to propel articles onto wherever they're destined to go. You don't need a 100 fake votes.
If you're going to game a site, might as well make it a high traffic site- I'm sure Digg and reddit get the vast majority of the bots/fake users.
That said, I see no ethical distinction between asking your friends to vote for a story and asking a bunch of random people on the internet to vote for a story. Either way, you're stuffing the ballot box.
One only has to look at the myriad submissions by Alex Jones/truther "bots" on reddit to see that.
I think you can ethically ask your friends to vote up your stories, as long as they actually have accounts used for more than voting up your stories. It would be like asking your school friends to vote for you if you were running for a school office.
I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with users politicizing the voting process. At least spam and most fluff seems to be taken care of quickly, so it isn't really a problem.
It's not really unethical, but it is generally frowned upon to have your friends vote up stories. There is a slippery slope with asking your friends to vote up stories; that is basically how digg works.
No... Ed W and I did an interview with Andrew Warner and Andrew seemed surprised that we basically had no method for getting stories to the front page. At the time of the interview I hadn't had a high point story for a month.
The powers that be are very good at what they do. They usually notice things that are out of the ordinary.
Actually the traffic here may not be really high, but it's exceptionally high-quality for the right products. Of course, the right products probably wouldn't need to purchase upvotes in the first place.
I'd be really curious to see what the quality is like for mediocre products.
As for Digg and reddit- many of you have startups and blogs that are floundering with minimal traffic and revenue.
Instead of complaining and being all up in arms, perhaps you should accept that Digg and reddit have been gamed by numerous entities for years, and learn how to game them for your own benefit. That doesn't mean spamming, it means giving your own quality content an extra push. Back when I did that sort of thing, I got dozens of stories to the Digg and reddit front pages. After receiving, synthetically, with many accounts and proxies, the first hundred or so votes needed to get to the front page, these stories went on to receive thousands of natural, real upvotes. So much for your "algorithms". If you can't beat them, join them.