

Voting Bot War at Reddit? - dood
http://politics.reddit.com/info/63bs1/comments/

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That's really interesting. I don't really ever think about the fact that all
this 'social media' could mainly be determined by bots.

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maurycy
And ghost accounts. (I recall both YouTube and reddit founders mentioned that
in the early days they had many accounts to keep the discussion and make an
impression there's a lot of people)

EDIT: I'd also add that the whole thing looks a bit scammy when you also take
into account that site owners make money on users' content. So, to sum up,
bots and ghost accounts provoke to sign up and provide content, which is
monetized by the site owners then.

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joshwa
The term you're looking for is 'sockpuppet'.

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tocomment
This is really cool in a semi-futuristic kind of way.

It also makes a dilema for users. For example I don't want to use a bot, but I
also want RP stories to get their fair shake, but if everyone else is going to
use a bot, then I have to also.

Hmm, I suppose there's a Nash equilibrium there :-)

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Tichy
I recently thought about a project called "anarchypedia", which would simply
be a wikipedia without any editors. I wonder what would happen? Perhaps there
would also be bot-wars, with spammer-bots mending articles into spam and
corrector-bots watching over the articles and fixing them back again.

Like I think for IRC, if you want to stay in control of your channel, you have
to run a bot that keeps the admin rights for you? Similarly, to keep in
control of an article on anarchypedia, you have to keep a corrector-bot
running...

I'd love to try this out, but I don't know how to set up an anonymous server.
Can't risk to be liable for the stuff people might be putting on that site.

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tocomment
Join the war, here's your weapon
([http://politics.reddit.com/info/639vp/comments/?already_subm...](http://politics.reddit.com/info/639vp/comments/?already_submitted=true)),
well at least if you're on the RIGHT side.

