I'm barely qualified to bring up this subject, as SEOmoz has certainly had our fair share of asking a friend to submit something to Digg, give us a boost on Reddit or add a tag at Del.icio.us, but I was pretty surprised to see the level to which social media manipulation has been taken:

Go visit the freebies section at Digitalpoint, and you'll see one of the most active sources of social media manipulation publicly available. The crowds are Digging, Redditing, Del.icio.using and Stumbling every few minutes. The timestamps on the 30 entries I viewed on the front page was less than 30 minutes - more than one post per minute on the topic of trading votes at the social sites (and this is late at night, PST).

Obviously, manipulating social media content, particularly the front page of Digg/Reddit has significant benefits, but to have a popular forum with people abusing the system out in the open like this seems almost bizarre. The sites and people who attempt to game the systems are putting themselves out there where anyone can find them. I wouldn't be surprised to find quality control teams from these sites monitoring those threads to help identifying and defeat spam.

What do you think? Is it OK to trade favors at social media sites? Is it wise to do it in a public forum? Is this a center for abuse, or simply the tip of the iceberg? And, maybe most importantly, how much of the content that gets voted up, thumbs up'd and tagged is organic?