Bombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings.
The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.
What if you limit accounts to real people and then keep track of their credibility? It's some initial effort but how could the ranking be manipulated when all dishonest people have burned their credibility?
I've always wondered if you could combat via referal-only sites. To get in you need to achir your humanness on someone else's account. If an account is found to invite too many spammers, robots, or otherwise it is banned or disallowed to invite more accounts.
I'm sure you could still manage to make "fake" accounts but it would be much more difficult, and linking them together would be much easier.
Of course starting a site like this would be very difficult. But maybe you could start without it then add it in once you get to a decent popularity such that many people can find a referral if they need to.
Of course it is a much smaller site so it isn't clear how effective this strategy would be at a large scale. Even a referral-based site approaching HN levels would be very interesting to see.
In China, all social accounts must be associated with a phone number, and phone numbers are tied to government identities. It doesn't stop any manipulation of scores and rankings.
> then keep track of their credibility?
It is very likely China will do that too soon. I think you can already imagine the ramifications.
You can’t limit to real people. If you managed to, I would make a service where people can sign up and I’ll pay to use their account. No cost to them and they make some money from it, seems totally reasonable.
That's just another group of people with reduced credibility. At some point, the price to incentivize the next person to offer their account is more expensive than the benefits of link manipulation. Every corrupted account can be discovered because the manipulated content stands out and will be reported.
The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.