There's a fascinating post at WhizSpark noting a simple way to use referer logs to spam blogdex and other listing and search engines. Cameron Marlowe of blogdex weighs in: Open systems grow faster than closed ones, and better allow for innovation. This creates value for their users. This value creates incentive for capturing that value, but the incentive is orthagonal to the value -- spammers don't care that their behavior damages the system that created the value to begin with. I remember the early spam on usenet -- Global Alert for All and the Green Card spam et al. Two things are different now. First, everything that launches launches at scale, at least potentially. It took email more than a decade to get to a million users. Now even moderately interesting software can get a hundred thousand users in months, and million-user software is still "niche", in the sense of sub-1% use compared to the population as a whole. Second, we've learned the lesson of standards and automation, so we have better hooks into our interfaces, for automatic manipulation, but this means better automation for people gaming the system as well. (I remember, a decade or so ago, someone asking on a newsgroup "How do I post to all the soc. groups at once? soc.* doesn't seem to work -- surely I don't have to enter all the group names in _by hand_!") The arms race is the same, but the speed with which value is created and the ease with which the manipulation can be automated now favor the spammers.