This is crap. It stops being a "fun example of the stuff you can do with very little Ruby" as soon as it performs some function with social ramifications. Code

This is crap. It stops being a "fun example of the stuff you can do with very little Ruby" as soon as it performs some function with social ramifications. Code does not exist in a moral vacuum. The fact of the matter is that people do use scripts like this to game the system, which inflates the meaningful currency with which a given community operates, ultimately devaluing and undermining that community. Scripts like this contribute to Twitter going the way of MySpace.