Is the New Social Web a Gamers Paradise?

There have been many methods that have been used to game Social Networks and sites like MyBlogLog, Technorati, Digg, Reddit among many many others. I created a twitter account sometime back, follow me and I might update more, I was intrigued to see that I already had 1 follower it was somebody named Forecast. Now how this "twitterer" got my web url on twitter and became my "follower" beats me. But I'm sure I will be blocking him/her soon.

Recent news about technorati favorites being gamed has surfaced. This has been happening for quite sometime now and not just with the favorites, but also with their rankings as well. Its quite simple actually, you start a blog post train by adding your friends they then add you back and then whoever takes part has to add all the blogs on the list and it keeps going and going.

OR - you could get as lucky as me and get 60 people to favorite your blog on the basis of one blog post only. That's right I never really cared much for the favorites section, still don't. But it was still an ego boost to see the amount of people who favorited my blog as a direct result of the traffic from that one single post on web design. I'm pretty sure they liked the other content on my blog too. Favorite my blog, Come on! you know you want to.

MyBlogLog is also subject to the same evil. You visit someone's blog and soon after they leave a message on your MBL profile in the hope that someone else will read it and visit them. Seriously, if you feel like you have to thank everyone for visiting your blog then you and your blog need some help. Plus if some people are really desperate then they just stay on your page and auto refresh every now and then to keep their picture on top of the widget. I think the number of days of their widget on my blog are numbered.

It's not just social networks that are subject to gaming, recently it was quite easy to game ReviewMe for getting whatever amount of traffic you could get. Some totally surprised advertisers were probably left wondering why a two star blog is advertising a $750 review price. They have since fixed the problem and now the default ranking is by the amount of stars that you have and not the price you set. {check out the images in the post linked above}

I'm not even going to begin about the efforts that people put behind getting their articles to the homepage of digg or reddit and other up and coming RSVC type sites. It is fine to get a few of your friends to digg the article and get noticed, everybody does it. But then once it gains a little momentum leave it be and let it just play out. The rest of the digg community will decide if your story is worth front page status. If it's good - nothing will hold it back, trust me I know from experience.

It's true there is a lot of momentum one can achieve from the millions of people that are part of these networks. You could literally go from a zero to the top if you play your cards right in a single day. So essentially the question is -