Slashdot Mirror
Trade of Google+1 "Likes" as a Business
siliconbits writes "Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system. Google+1 selling sites like Googleplus1supply, buygoogleplus1 or Blackcatseo have cropped up during the last few months — amongst so many other websites — with the sole aim of selling Google+1 "likes" to publishers and businesses."
Meta-moderation worked on /. too, why not for Google? It should be trivial to easily identify such "services" by their likes being quickly metamoderated into the ground, hence rendering all their "likes" worthless. Of course, this again can be gamed, but with enough layers of moderation, meta-moderation and meta-meta-moderation, it should become rather tricky for such "services" to continue their business against the rest of the internet users.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I read an interesting article a while back that noted that people may become isolated as everything becomes more personalized and their fishbowl shrinks.