The Time 100 voting is open where we get to submit and vote people in as the top 100 people in the world of 2009 or something like that. It’s a very serious contest organized by a large media corporation and the results are published in Time Magazine and hundreds of other publications also cover the people who make the list.
Some anonymous cowards on a popular site, 4Chan have decided to “hack” the results and vote up 4Chan’s creator “moot” as the top of the list and completely ruin the top 20 finalists with fake voting. You can read the full report at TechCrunch. First of all, 4Chan is one of the primary sites that is fueled by anonymity and their mob hacking isn’t funny or cute. I blame Time for not implementing Facebook Connect or OpenID to reduce the anonymity. Sure Time would be narrowing the voting to users of Facebook only but it’s a solid 200 million people which isn’t too shabby. Furthermore, I’m sure Facebook would be happy with the news and help Time promote the voting on Facebook.com.
If Facebook isn’t the answer, Time could use systems that call the voter and the vote has to give a verbal confirmation code that they saw on the site. Each number was logged and an even better method is auto-mailers that go to homes with a code that the voter enters on Time.com. All three of these would reduce voting but I think the Time 100 can deal with a 15% drop in votes because it would barely make a dent in the amount of people that do vote in this if this system meant that there was zero anonymity to the voting process.
Time basically screwed themselves by allowing this system to be used so I don’t blame 4chan. If you put a piece of candy in front of a child and close the door, he’s going to eat it because no one is looking and that’s just human nature. The web is crawling with children that feed their egos because no one is looking but if more and more websites expose the children and put them under a microscope, it will reduce a ton of this tom foolery on the web. Take a stand, unmask the cowards and let’s kill anonymity on the web.