one thing you might not have known about Spock is that in order to leave tags / vote, you need to have an account / be logged in… thus, no “anonymous tag spamming”… everything is on the record, and all votes have an owner.

similarly, over time certain individuals on Spock will begin to build up more credibility / authority, and their votes will carry more legitimacy… sort of like how folks achieve high reputation scores on eBay, or greater authority on Wikipedia, or Digg, or SlashDot.

while it’s certainly possible — even likely — that many open systems will have spam of some sort (search spam, blog spam, email spam, tag spam, etc), there are ways to limit the power of bad actors and to encourage and enable the power of good actors. the community overall can help limit this behavior, and the system itself can also assist the community.

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, eBay, Hotmail, Blogger, and many other successful web properties have these same issues — and they appear to be able to solve these issues and protect their users from spam (some better than others).

Spock is a new service, however given their engineers come from some of the same environments above (several ex-Yahoo folks), there’s no reason to think they can’t figure out similar ways to combat & deter spam.

- dave mcclure

(ps – full disclosure: i’m an advisor to Spock, and i tag-bomb Mike Arrington all the time