This whole Internet thing has ringlets of phases. If you remember and took part on early board forums, you learned of administrators pinning posts warning users not to do this and that to boost their old posts in some artificial way. This later occurred on next generation websites for any post and sites which started having boost mechanisms, complete with new warnings about “gaming the system.” Except to these administrators and dedicated users, the reality of the effects of gaming the system did not amount to much harm. A popular sh!tpost here, a banned user there, nothing earth shaking, nothing affecting peoples' real (offline) lives. Annoying at best most times.

Each gamer pushed the system once they found some small easy for them way to do so for some near meaningless benefit (sometimes call karma, probably inappropriately).

Now, we have these billionaires doing the same thing, but with stocks, bonds, funds, news, currency, policies, rules, laws, world leaders, countries, and world events.

We need stronger ban hammers.