The following was written by frequent Slashdot editorial contributor
Bennett Haselton. He writes
"Recently author Annalee
Newitz created
a bit of a stir with the revelation that she had
bought
her way to
the front page of the story-ranking site
Digg.
Since Digg allows any registered user to go to a story's URL and "digg it"
in order to
push it upward through the story-ranking system, it was inevitable that
services like User/Submitter
would come
along, where a Digg user can pay for other users to cast votes to push
their story up
to the top.
User/Submitter says they are currently
backlogged and not
taking new
orders, but they say the service will return and will soon feature services
for
manipulating similar sites like Digg competitor reddit.
Even if the new U/S features are vaporware, it probably won't be long
before other companies
offer similar services.
But it seems like all of these story-ranking sites could prevent the
manipulation by making
one simple change to their voting algorithm."