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.
