Tara "Miss Rogue" Hunt, Alex Barnett and Ben Barren have been hacking Memeorandum - trying to get a post to appear on the front page of the automated news site by gaming the system. And it appears to have worked. Alex even created a screencast showing exactly how they did it (very easily, it seems). The serious point here is that once someone figures out how an algorithm works, they will use that knowledge to their own advantage - if Memeorandum ever goes mainstream, it will be targeted by spammers and lose much of its usefulness to the community. Google's Pagerank algorithm has suffered the same fate: the abundance of spam links has undermined the usefulness of the service, resulting in a constant and unending battle between Google and the spammers.

In my post Humans vs Algorithms, I suggested that we need to put human minds in the loop if we are to keep the spam out of search engines and news sites. Time to quote myself:

As you may already know, my feeling is that humans are generally better at editing than algorithms, but by the same token you could say that the main algorithms in use today (Google PageRank, Memeorandum, Google News) are largely based on human decisions, where a link generally counts as a vote. At the other end of the spectrum, you have sites like Digg and Reddit, which are entirely edited by humans in a distributed way. But I’m not sure if it’s really a case of humans versus algorithms: I think the future could lie with services like Wink, where Google’s search results are rated, tagged and built upon by human minds. In this way, humans could make up for the obvious failings of algorithms - namely the scourge of spam and splogs.

This recent success in "hacking Memeorandum" confirms to me that we need some kind of human intervention in these systems. The answer may indeed lie with human annotation ala Wink.com, or it may be the case that entirely human systems (Digg, Reddit) are less prone to attack. Perhaps Google could send off its search results to be rated by the human minds at Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Either way, I don't believe that algorithms can survive in their current form. Human judgement isn't infallible, but it's the best thing we've got.

[More Memeorandum hacking at Hellonline and supr.c.ilio.us]

Update: Okay, looks like I won't have time to follow this up today, but I've clarified some points in the comments. I think the key thing to say here is that I'm not criticizing Memeorandum, but simply pointing out that humans can often step in to fix the problems we experience with algorithms. And I don't think I should have quoted that original post - that makes this look like a debate between human and algorithms, which isn't really the case.