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Reddit famously had its staff run hundreds of fake accounts to bootstrap discussions when there wasn't enough traffic yet. This is far from unique, too. My und
by ddebernardy 8y ago
Reddit famously had its staff run hundreds of fake accounts to bootstrap discussions when there wasn't enough traffic yet.
This is far from unique, too. My understanding is that dating websites tend to get bootstrapped using purchased profiles from other dating websites.
- Edd314159 8y agoI think this is common practice when building any new community from scratch.
- ddebernardy 8y agoI dunno. I grew a (small) software-user community once and it was initially done using a single account - my own - in a support forum. Eventually there were a few more staff accounts - one for each - and some very active forum members. That was ethical by any reasonable definition. I don't intend to mean that what Reddit did is very unethical - or indeed unusual. And if anything it was a good idea and it worked. But what we did strikes me as different from using multiple accounts to impersonate different users and chat with yourself's and your colleagues' multiple personae.
- kazinator 8y agoThis is perfectly ethical. You can create whatever objects you want on your own server, if you aren't breaking any law.
- mrguyorama 8y ago"You can physically do it" is not the definition of "ethically fine"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 8y ago(I speak a dialect of English in which "can" doesn't exclusively refer to the physical ability to perform an action. For instance "can I be excused for a moment?" isn't normally interpreted as "does there exist a speaker in this room who is capable of giving me permission to leave for a moment?"; in context, the meaning is that of asking for the permission.)
- mrguyorama 8y agoNevertheless, isn't "Can" still different from "Should" in this dialect?
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI have a nice printer at home; is it equally ethical to print money? But that money doesn't only exist in your home!, you might cry out. To which I say: you think all those profiles were just sitting and talking to each other? Were they paying the dating site proprietor?
- kazinator 8y agoWhat the profiles are doing is a separate question from whether it is ethical for them to exist.
- sidcool 8y agoBeing ethical and breaking law are different things. Not everything legal is ethical.
- kazinator 8y agoI can't think of what would be unethical about simply creating "astroturfed" user accounts on your own site. Some specific action that a "fake" account might take could be unethical, though it's hard to imagine what that could be such that it wouldn't be unethical coming from a "real" account. Well, that depends: if someone believes that user IDs X and Y are different people, when in fact they are one, has there been a breach of ethics from that situation alone.
- cimmanom 8y agoMany consider deception to be unethical. However, on the scale of deceptions, many of us would consider faking a userbase in order to jump-start a community to be toward the white lie end of the spectrum.
- kazinator 8y agoThere are obvious examples of deception being thoroughly ethical.