Sex in the City and the risks of Algorithm based Aggregation

Just saw the above twt come up on Twitter for Tweetmeme, a Twitter based news aggregator that uses popularity algorithms to grab news. The URL links to a standard "Find Sex in your City" service. And sure enough, there was the leader article in Tweetmeme (see below)



Tweetmeme calls itself as the "Hottest News on Twitter" - clearly some people decided it needed to up-temperature a bit

Points to the risks of pure Algorithm based systems, ie that:

- People will try and game them
- They are always gameable, no matter how hard one tries (cf Google)

It happened early Saturday morning when the Tweetmeme team were probably sensibly in bed (their own, we are sure - we make no allegations about such service usage here )

It is interesting in another respect - last week YouTube was hacked so that a lot of porn videos started to appear, and today I read that quite a few such videos lead users back to phishing sites. Is this the sign of a new wave of Sexspam, we wonder?

I suspect this is also why Techmeme eventually employed a curator, Megan McCarthy (though when I met her at SXSW in Austin and asked her, she scuttled away sharpish )