Hi, Abby from Tipjoy here. One exciting aspect of tipjoy is that the ranking is determined by the amount of PAID tips something has received. Right now nothing’s yet been paid (except for a little bit we’ve put in ourselves), so the top tip list has the spam you've mentioned. However, as people begin to pay for their tips (by hitting the ‘pay’ button in the upper right corner of tipjoy.com when signed in), the most popular tip list will start to evolve to reflect what’s really worth money to people.

That being said, we're probably going to add a "safe for work" mode, which you can toggle to hide questionable content.

I'm glad you're aware of this. I don't know much about blackhat SEO, but if Tipjoy becomes an "authority site" such that getting a link from you would be the difference between page 2 and page 1 of a SERP, they'd gladly pay more than a few dollars for big-revenue keywords relating to gambling, porn, and finance.

Indeed. We'll need to do something clever to prevent that. Hopefully we grow fast enough that it is a problem soon.

I'm very interested in giving more than the "top tips" page. I'd like to build a recommendation engine that give you want you want to see, based upon your past tipping behavior. That could entirely eliminate the other problems with other social news sites. We'll see.

A combination of recommendation engine, sock-puppet squelching, manual site curation, crowd sourcing, and tweaks to our hotness algorithm should be a solution.