I would personally caution against the championing, if not the individual embracing of such an idea. This looks like a 'race to the bottom' to me. Consider wha

I would personally caution against the championing, if not the individual embracing of such an idea. This looks like a 'race to the bottom' to me. Consider what happens in the long run. Sooner or later people will either catch on or get used to a website always having users or content, no matter how new or actually fake it is. Some or all of these things may happen: 1. Online communications between 'people,' real or fake, becomes devalued. They are already devalued with the flood of people with bad taste. Of course, one can argue that communication is value in itself; the feeling of connecting. In that case I have a great startup idea; one that makes you talk with chat bots but feels like actually conversing. If you use sophisticated enough text generation techniques and market it to stupid/desperate enough people I seriously think this could work to some extent. 2. You will have to work extra, putting in fake content, just to launch a socially-oriented website. Otherwise it will not get off the ground. I await the day until a website has to send me flowers through the mail in order to grab my attention. Perhaps this is a good thing, because there are already more than enough socially-oriented websites. But what can we do about it now? One can take the view that this was a great blog post. Not only because it has named startups that use this approach, so the more principled of us have extra data on which kind of people are honest enough to do business with, but people of varying degrees of honesty have come out in the comments section, some virtually boasting of their 'faking it' techniques. We now have more data; you may now do as you wish with it. Reflect on the business culture and environment that requires this sort of behavior and make a decision; is this the kind of thing I want to associate myself with?