"Someone has already made reference to the Mechanical Turk HIT under the answer in question. And the answer has been “collapsed” because of the policy violation, which means that no matter how many upvotes it receives paid or unpaid it won’t show up. Repeat offenders of Quora policy are warned and then potentially blocked."
And now to get rid of competitors, just open Mechanical Turk HITs to upvote their answers, report them, and watch them getting banned.
This dilution/abuse problem in voting sites (HN too)... I'd rather see each user getting a view of votes - a customized view where there is more weight given to votes coming from a user's direct and secondary networks.
In general there seems to be a lack of customization for what a user thinks is signal (by way of their own votes and who they choose to pay attention to) and not what the whole community thinks is signal. That doesn't seem to ever work quite right when the population gets too big.
This guy will get more attention from being written up on Techcrunch than he would from his hare-brained spamming scheme. Good job giving him undeserved free publicity, TechCrunch.
His publicity is the side effect. I think letting us know of this kind of tactic and the problems associated with sites like Quora and possibly Hacker News and other social sorting websites was worth the disbenefit of the undeserved publicity.
Anyone heard any good stuff from this: http://advogato.org/trust-metric.html ? That stuff is ancient and I can't find any working examples outside of papers.
And now to get rid of competitors, just open Mechanical Turk HITs to upvote their answers, report them, and watch them getting banned.