Well looking at Mechanical Turk [1] it seems that Twitter manipulation comes in at about 5 cents a 'hit' so if a Webby was worth $25,000 to you, you could buy half a million votes. I was wondering if you could go 'back in time' but couldn't find that, to see if there was anything like this in it.
That being said, there are lots and lots of bots on Twitter [2]and given how easy it is to program one, and the fact that folks might pay for it, wouldn't you like to have a 'twitter army' in your pocket that for the right price could give you a shout out? Heck people do it with zombie PCs all the time.
At the risk of sounding naive, I still think that this kind of nonsense should be called out and not just some "norm" for online voting. The concept of consumer democracy has a lot of potential, and we need to keep objecting to bots and bought votes to make it reliable. Acceptance of unethical behavior just makes it more entrenched.
Oh I absolutely agree. In fact any sort of voting where the only authentication for the constituent is an email address should never be used for anything. It is entirely possible to fabricate a million users in the blink of an eye. Even ones that use a variety of web mail services (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Etc) Not to mention that its pretty trivial to set up your own domains and create mailbox farms with automated responses clicking on authenticating links.
I am speculating that this sort of abuse will lead to the emergence of a nominal digital ID implementation. A point where an individual will not be allowed to participate in some online activities that they might wish to participate in because their lack of proof that they are real, and unique.
but, why wait until the last minutes? when I cheat ... I mean, if I were going to cheat, I'd want to make it look good. So, I would spread the votes out over a longer period.
That is a great question. One could speculate, last minute idea "Hey this is close enough, I bet we could win it with ..." or a feint of obviousness, or any number of things.
The OP speculates a voting robot, however if you did it with Mechanical Turk which uses real people you might find that they procrastinate and only pick up tasks that are about to go off the lists or something. That would be especially true if price per hit went up as it approached the deadline, one could arbitrage the value vs the number of hits you could do in time to meet the deadline.
Yeah, I added MTurk as a possible explanation in one of my edits before putting up the post. It would be a more expensive, but harder to trace way to do the same thing - MTurk is effectively a human bot. One giveaway would be that most of those IPs are likely to come from outside the US, and since most of these sites only serve US (and Canada/UK in the case of PM), it'd be easy to tell that something was off if you knew that fact.
One reason to do it at the last minute is not to leave a chance for competitors to react, as demonstrated by the parent post actually: they saw promising results early on, relaxed and went for a nice dinner and just checked later.
The 'constant rate' allegation is serious, but given the number of 'votes' involved if there is any truth to the claim it should be trivial to suss out. Humans suck at cheating statistics. Even someone with a good model for human behavior in these circumstances isn't going to have a good handle on faking all the metrics picked up by third party web analytics in conjunction with server logs.
Yeah, I'm very curious too. If the Webby Awards people ever respond to my request for them to inspect the data, I'll follow this up with any findings they share.
That being said, there are lots and lots of bots on Twitter [2]and given how easy it is to program one, and the fact that folks might pay for it, wouldn't you like to have a 'twitter army' in your pocket that for the right price could give you a shout out? Heck people do it with zombie PCs all the time.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/mturk/viewsearchbar?searchWords=twitte...!
[2] http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/mostactiveusers/