Parent isn't saying you should create Reddit accounts to shill for your new thing. They are referencing the sock puppet accounts the Reddit founders used to ma

Parent isn't saying you should create Reddit accounts to shill for your new thing. They are referencing the sock puppet accounts the Reddit founders used to make Reddit look like less of a ghost town in the early days[1]. > Huffman reveals that, “In the beginning Alexis and I submitted all the content.” When they submitted content they created new fake user names so that it would look like the site was populated with a large user base, while, at least in the beginning, it was just the two of them submitting the content. > Huffman explains that this did two things. For starters, it helped set the tone of the site. “Websites have this kind of inertia, and we submitted content that we would be interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit, at least for our peer group, was good, interesting stuff. We wanted a site with the most interesting content online, and so we did our best to find it and then we submitted it ourselves.” > Creating fake users and submitting content through them also made the site feel alive. Huffman says, “Users like to feel a part of something. If they showed up to the website and the front page was blank, it just looks like a ghost town.” He says, “At the time I think we were just embarrassed to have an empty website so we submitted the content, and it worked.” After a few months they had grown their real user base to the point that they didn’t have to submit content anymore. [1]: https://www.adweek.com/digital/reddit-fake-users/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/reddit-fake-users/