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I've always found it amusing how shocked/surprised people are about the Reddit fake users strategy. It's like, the best way you can tell people had no experienc
by CM30 9y ago
I've always found it amusing how shocked/surprised people are about the Reddit fake users strategy. It's like, the best way you can tell people had no experience with internet forums or community management before the days of social media.
What Reddit did here is basically what about 70%* of internet forums did to get their initial users. Made up a bunch of fake user accounts and posted under them for however long it took until actual people started using the site. Heck, some people did this on an almost industrial scale with stuff like Yahoo Answers feeds and what not.
That's because people don't use a community that isn't active for much the same reason they don't tend to eat in a restaurant that's deserted; they take the lack of activity as a sign of low quality. So if you want to get a community site active, you'll need to resort to 'questionable' things.
* I say this because there are other means of getting forums active, like doing post exchanges with people on admin/forum promotion sites or signing up to services which give you points for posting on other websites in the network and then do likewise for people who use your own site. But to some degree, almost all forums and community sites get big due to 'enticed' users that aren't posting there purely for the love of the topic/community.
- GuiA 9y agoThe best forums I've been a part of/moderated were forums that originally served for customer support for a product/company, and naturally became a hang out spot for people with interests in common. I've been part of several dozen such forums over the years, from hundreds to tens of thousands of users. None of them had capital dedicated to community building. I've also seen many people try to follow the model you outlined (faking users) and none of them were successful. Obviously that approach seems to work in some cases (if you have cash to burn?), but I'm glad that I've seen only more genuine undertakings succeed. Seems more like the kind of internet I want to be a part of.
- CM30 9y agoYeah, it's likely different for a support forum/forum that used to be a support forum. In that case, the popularity of your product or service can create a community without needing to do anything special on the forum side of things. But what I said about fake users definitely applies a lot more if your forum is the entire website and the community is the only goal there. Your average gaming/film/tv/music/sports/whatever forum lives or dies based on how many people appear to post/visit every day. Also, it doesn't take any cash to have fake users/activity. Just a lot of free time to spend posting away under pseudonyms. If you don't have that time, you can always do things like literally edit the forum stats (there are plugins for that[1]), 'buy' services from certain websites to post for you[2] or if you're really morally questionable, set up a script that takes random people's accounts and makes them appear to be online[3]. Really, community management is a lot like SEO. You've got everything from people who don't do anything in the slightest bit 'shady' to build activity and just kind of hope they can market the forum on their own to those who do things 100 times less 'ethical' than having fake user accounts. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20080905041551/https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=117933 https://web.archive.org/web/20080905041551/https://www.vbull... 2. https://forumpromotion.net/forum/forums/posting-packages.6/ https://forumpromotion.net/forum/forums/posting-packages.6/ 3. https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-fake-users.4845/ https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-fake-users.4845/