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?