It seems that the sites where you can buy StumbleUpon votes are becoming all too popular and accessible, and purchased votes are visible more and more often. Fading are the days when a website became visible because visitors actually enjoyed it. Spam bots are also very frequent now; they've been a problem for a long time, but never as significantly as they are today.
It may be archived a few pages by the time you read this, but at this time there's over a full complete page of one-worded reviews which are clearly from the same keyword grab-bag: "cool", "nifty", "lol", "haha", and "nice". All at about the same time (all say "4 days ago" currently).
That situation could fall under one of two categories:
1. They're all bots just trying to increase their thumbs-up count.
2. or PayPal is trying to to push back the older reviews, a good half or more of which are negative and outline the controversies involved with PayPal (frozen accounts, security flaws, etc.).
I mostly believe it would fall under category #1, however, since eBay now owns PayPal, it does seem suspicious.
Either way, whether it's a result of spam bots or a result of unfair influence, it's a major problem which should be addressed before StumbleUpon becomes just another marketing product instead of an interesting and useful tool/community.
I would normally ignore sites such as PayPal while stumbling; indeed, I use it myself to great effect. All the same, I am unimpressed with PayPal's attempt to boost its own ratings and shift bad reviews off the front page of its review page. Hence the thumbs-down.
The best ways via which a concerned citizen can inform our spam detection process are:
1. Rate garbage content thumb-down.
2. Mark spam reviews as unhelpful (Helpful->No).
3. Report spam messages that arrive in your inbox.
4. Flag suspected spammer accounts via the 'Flag as Spammer' feature.
Note that it's often poor strategy for us to delete a spammer account immediately, but we do our utmost to minimize impact of ratings by a spammers on the stumble button of legit users.
Josh1billion
tribe10
induscrypt