4 ms·

So reddit faked their early users... even though they had pg's readers. A new social site must get really creative if they consider faking users not ethical (as

• danteembermage 20y ago
  I can't help being curious; aren't there algorithms that itentify the likelihood of a sample of text being from a given writer based differences in writing style. If so we have plenty of writing guaranteed to be from Alexis and maybe we could identify which accounts were his.
  • kn0thing 20y ago
    We didn't have commenting back then, so these were all link submissions. We basically stopped using these accounts after that first month or so -- once we started getting traffic. For us, there didn't appear to be a major ethical dilemma. We used these accounts simply so that new users would see a front page of links instead of a blank website (or one with only submissions from 'kn0thing' and 'spez'). For a site like reddit, it seemed to be a key part of showing new users how the site worked. Once we got traffic (from places like YC and PG) we stopped needing these accounts and thus stopped using them.
    • ntoshev 20y ago
      Without writing comments it is probably Ok for me as well. Voting is still somewhat about faking other people's opinions, but there is obviously a large grey area here.
• timg 20y ago
  Their success speaks for itself in this case.
  • ntoshev 20y ago
    Ethics and success are (mostly) orthogonal.