Astroturfing your own site is a longstanding tradition in media. A long time ago in a career far, far away I wrote classified advertising software for desktop publishers, typically small outfits like trade magazines or penny-savers.
When launching a new feature like classifieds, it does you no good to put out a blank page. So absolutely every customer that didn't already have classified ads would astroturf with fake ads.
The ethics of their profession was to discard any mail-in replies unread. For example, one customer used my software for personals. They had a strict rule that any reply to one of the "fake" mailboxes was to be shredded immediately upon receipt, unopened. They didn't even want them laying around lest someone write down a name or return address.
One there are enough "real" ads, the fake ones are phased out. I can't really say whether it is right or wrong, but I can say it seems to be a standard practice predating the world wide web.
that's interesting, but they sure do seem the same. I'm thinking the only difference here is cultural. Like how we don't view reporting a price as $4.99 instead of $5 as unethical.
hmm. I want to reserve judgment until I read about reddit astroturfing their own website. It reminds me of a golang presentation, where the speaker created an omegle clone, but to boot-strap it he used markov chain bots if no one connected in 5 seconds. http://vimeo.com/53221560 . I didn't think of that as a particularly immoral thing to do.
edit: Actually I'm not really sure what to search for here. Do you have an article going over the details?
