I find HFT is a lot similar to SEO, and the perception is similar as well.
People just don't like either because they feel it's not bringing any extra value to society, and it's all about gaming something for your own personal wealth. But most people aren't looking out for your personal interest anyway, so you should ignore them.
The thing is that "good" SEO isn't gaming the system but rather working to make sure that your site is a "notable authority" in whatever niche you're targeting. If the article is the counter-argument, what is the argument that HFT provides some similar kind of usefulness.
I disagree. SEO serves a purpose. It makes web sites more accessible to users, by correctly using HTML (title, h1, alt="", etc.) and it makes the web more machine readable and thus easier to find useful things. But I guess you mainly refer to the spammer SEOs that try to trick Google.
HTF otoh does not serve any purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, it brings instability into the market and makes the market less useful. But my guess it that it will need a major market crash before HFT gets banned.
No. The dominate strategies of HFT firms are market making and related arbitrage such as latency arbitrage between venues. There is nothing nefarious about having a computer do this in general as it is much more efficient than a human doing this. These strategies are not very complicated and instead require a lot of infrastructure to run. It used to be you needed to buy or rent a floor seat at the exchange to be able to run these types of strategies. Today that money goes to servers, hosting and engineers.
Automated trading, such as statistical arbitrage would be lower frequency, although often still high frequency by most peoples standards. This algorithms often are liquidity takers from HFT.
People just don't like either because they feel it's not bringing any extra value to society, and it's all about gaming something for your own personal wealth. But most people aren't looking out for your personal interest anyway, so you should ignore them.