I'm pretty sure (or rather, I hope) HN for example has mechanisms in place to spot accounts created solely for upvoting/downvoting submissions and/or comments t

I'm pretty sure (or rather, I hope) HN for example has mechanisms in place to spot accounts created solely for upvoting/downvoting submissions and/or comments though. If the content has anything to do at all with politics or music or movies or a lot of other things, or anyone has the slightest economic incentive, the answer to your question is, sadly, "enough". Depending on their energy, it really takes only one person. I think this also applies to FB and G+... but I don't care, I want this to be better than FB and G+ likes, which I despise haha. And for a personal photo gallery it is probably perfect, and other such things. Small communities of nice people, which do exist. But for a site a la reddit or youtube or political blog aggregators? Hmm. But maybe that's okay, maybe huge sites can't have nice things, and that's fine. I hate to sound like I'm dissing this. It's really not meant that way, to the contrary: I love how configurable and sexy it is, I upvoted the submission instantly, and then proceeded to ask questions. And maybe it's really more a social than a technical problem. In an ideal world, we would use these as tools to make our opinion known, appreciate them as such and never ever fuck with them.