17 ms·

How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts

192 points by hornokplease 14y ago

citricsquid 14y ago
Alexis has posted about this before, a few years ago I think. He has lots of similar things on his blog about how reddit started, eg: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle... The video is worth watching though, it has more insights than just fake users.
- kn0thing 14y ago
  Aye, more in my GA class, Making Something People Love: http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneurship/making-something-people-love http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...
Mystalic 14y ago
You often have to seed a social site in order for it to be compelling for people to consume. Once they're hooked, then they start submitting. As long as the quality is good, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
- Ergomane 14y ago
  I've built a number of social sites for broadcasting companies and this is indeed common practice. No-one's attracted to a forum filled with void. All you need is a few carefully constructed, interesting personas as a nucleus to kickstart, then gradually remove them once the community has formed around them and becomes self-sustaining.
zainny 14y ago
I'm in a situation where a user-submitted content driven site I'm about to launch is going to be in need of a lot of content to get it kick-started. Has anyone had any experience using services like Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) to do this? Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  "Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case." You don't need to actually create the accounts by hand, you just need some sort of admin mode that lets you submit content and then attributes it to a different account each time.
  - baby 14y ago
    this, I did that for my website. if(ADMIN){ generate a random username from a dictionary (what I did was combining two words from a dictionary of words (english.txt) and then shorting it if was too long). register the user post from his account }
- hahla 14y ago
  Mturk is great for menial tasks in my experience. ie. Click here, look at this page, and write summary. Even then a portion of users dont follow the instructions properly. I cant imagine using mturk to seed a site with quality content that other real visitors will be looking for. Your better off seeding the content yourself imho.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  The problem with Mechanical Turk is that you tend to get a lot of low-quality content. If people don't have an emotional investment in the site's success, they'll usually just write drivel and collect their fee. That sets a whole tone for the site which isn't really sustainable. Common approaches I've seen for seeding a UGC site: 1.) Create lots of sock-puppets yourself and write/find the content that you yourself would want to read. Or get your friends to help. Example: Reddit. 2.) Write for your community. Don't worry about being big, just build something you and your friends would want to use. Once they start using it, they'll tell their friends, and you can get big later. Example: LiveJournal, HotOrNot, Fark, many niche sites. 3.) Scrape the hell out of your best competitor and then either provide a better user experience or SEO your site so you rank higher than them. Note that this is almost certainly against their TOS, is probably copyright infringement, and will get you on Google's shit-list, so you're in for a fair amount of pain if you're caught. Examples: Facebook, About.com, YouTube. 4.) Contact a couple celebrities in your field and see if they're willing to let you host their works, or if you can license their works with a revshare/partnership/whatever. All it takes is one really popular author to endorse you, and you'll get the halo effect of lots of less popular authors signing up because they want to be that one. Alternatively, be that celebrity yourself, so that people want to contribute to your site to bask in your reflected glow. Examples: JoelOnSoftware, Hacker News, StackOverflow. 5.) Be an aggregator first, nail your user-experience, and then once you have the visitors coming in, start adding your own hosting as a value-add. Examples: FriendFeed, many Google products. 6.) Throw money at the problem. Examples: Google+, Bing.
Matt_Mickiewicz 14y ago
Fake it until you make it...
yaix 14y ago
The important bit here is "...the type of articles they wanted read. This 'set the tone' for the site as whole." The first few hundred users of your site will determine what kind of users the site will attract, so "being" many of the first few hundred users yourself makes perfect sense, if you want to be guiding your project and not just "hoping for the best".
- zach 14y ago
  One of the unusual experiences I had growing up in LA was a high school club fundraiser where we all went to a sitcom. Yes, we were hired as a studio audience for an evening. This was clever because they gave us a reason, not just an individual reason but a collective reason, to be there. We felt more engaged with the experience, even when it dragged into the late evening. We actually ended up laughing, at jokes that were not that funny when they ended up on TV. Ultimately, what they did to get us there enhanced the enjoyment of the later users... I mean viewers. I wouldn't hesitate to get early users the same way, for the same reason. Getting people to sit in a seat in a studio and laugh for an evening is basically a solved problem. But getting a sharper-than-average, engaged group of early app or site users is still tough. And it's desperately needed. As others mention, Mechanical Turk is a pretty bad fit. You're probably better off getting a few friends to be sockpuppets (be sure to pick less silly names than "Nutshapio" though). Maybe a startup founder could try taking inspiration from this story to turn their public beta into a fundraiser. Oh, and I can't miss this opportunity to mention the BetaArmy subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BetaArmy http://www.reddit.com/r/BetaArmy That's about it as far as resources I've run across for getting a great first hundred users. So what are the best ways everyone else has found (apart from being in YC)? Does anyone run a service to satisfy this need?
- mibbitier 14y ago
  It set the tone for the first few months. It used to be about startups, tech, etc in the early days. Now it's all lolpics, atheism, LGBT issues, drugs, anti-corporation/government etc etc. The people who have most time to participate (Out of work, college students, etc) may not necessarily be the people you want...
  - 14y ago
cjoh 14y ago
And now Alexis wants to move Congress?
mkramlich 14y ago
This rings true to me. Because one of the things that's shocked me about Reddit, on many occasions, is the great level of comedy, and sometimes just writing in general, in the comment threads. Not all the time, everywhere, of course. But many times I'd be reading threads and thinking, "There are some really talented folks in this thread, comedy/writing-wise, I wonder if any of them are sock puppets? Or moonlighting professionals?" Far above the average quality level you'd see in most other websites. Threads would just scream, "comment ring". Indeed the whole Reddit tradition of novelty accounts (eg. EverythingISayIsALie, InappropriateRemark) feels like something bootstrapped internally before taking off among real endusers. This was just always a sense I've gotten about the site. Nice to hear some evidence that, at last early on, they were doing precisely this kind of thing. Perhaps it's still happening.
- wging 14y ago
  On that note, did you know that Trapped_In_Reddit scavenges the top comments from earlier postings and reposts them? This was a big thing just a few days ago. http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/v6wz7/worst_hunting_dog_ever/c51v7sm http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/v6wz7/worst_hunting_d...
- staunch 14y ago
  Pretty sure they didn't start almost any of the memes. I think they mostly did the fakery in the very early days, even before there were comments.
  - franzus 14y ago
    Yep, reddit is 4chan for soccer moms. There's not much real creativity going on there.
- ShardPhoenix 14y ago
  The concept of novelty accounts goes back to the earliest days of electronic text-based communication, and probably back to newspaper letter columns and whatnot before that.
GigabyteCoin 14y ago
This sounds pretty similar to the plenty of fish story. Casinos have been doing it for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling I say good job boys.
rwhitman 14y ago
I have a social travel product (http://wherescool.com http://wherescool.com) that I launched in 2009 with a team composed of 65+ "writer interns" I found off of the NYC Craigslist jobs section. We filled up the site with so much quality content it was written up by the NY Times within a few weeks. Pretty sure I was inspired by Reddit at the time, and also Yelp which actually was mostly seeded by paid writers in the early days. There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to dabble in...
- matt312 14y ago
  It seems difficult to get such a large team of quality writers. Did you pay them?
  - rwhitman 14y ago
    Nope. Everyone was an aspiring writer so the quality was significantly better than most user generated content
    - exim 14y ago
      But after you get (or got already?) substantial income, I think you should buy them a beer, at least.
      - rwhitman 14y ago
        I have bought more than a few of them lunch / dinner when they're in town, some of the top writers I've written recommendations for and helped them find jobs. But it wasn't because of any substantial income, those nice lunches & dinners probably got me a net operating loss for the year...
    - maayank 14y ago
      How did you pitch it to them?
      - 14y ago
zafriedman 14y ago
I'm sorry for saying no more than this because it certainly doesn't contribute much to the discussion, but this wasn't really a secret.
napolux 14y ago
Also in Italy is a common strategy to fill of "paid content" such kind of sites (and also blog & forums) right after launch. It makes sense, indeed.... Who wants to partecipate to an empty reddit?
nkurz 14y ago
I'm surprised that this behaviour seems to be tolerated. Yes, it works, but so do a lot of other slimy subterfuges and shady business practices. I'm steadfastly of the opinion that if you can't be honest about how you are doing it, it shouldn't be done, and shouldn't be condoned. I do not believe that ends justify means. Lies and deceit make for a lousy foundation. Would the site really have been worse off if the same posts had been submitted under the founders' real names? Instead of starting out with false pretenses, could they have encouraged their friends to contribute? I think once one goes down this path, the success of the whole endeavor is tainted. Yes, crime frequently pays and cheaters often win, but that's something that we as a community should work to change.
- raheemm 14y ago
  crime frequently pays and cheaters often win That is a severe judgement. I see it more as a clever hack. Building a community site or a marketplace is the age old chicken and egg problem. Without an existing community, you cant get users. And without users you cant build a community.
- jcc80 14y ago
  Kevin Rose first mentioned Digg as being a site that belonged to one of his friend's instead of saying "Check out my new site Digg!" Both Reddit & Digg would have been worse off if the founders didn't do what they did. These are social sites and subject to the same kind of first impression biases that we all face in person. Imagine showing up at a party with 2 guys sitting on a couch talking to each other compared to a party with people out front talking, people inside dancing and a small group in the back yard sharing a laugh. Social proof matters & I'd hardly consider this cheating or slimy.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    But it is. People will look at a site like HN, say, "Ah, there are lots of really smart people on here: this guy has done this, that guy has done that, etc.", only to find out it's really just pg arguing with himself. It's deceptive because people believe they are getting 500 independent evaluations when really they're getting 5 original responses times 100 falsifications of what those five people think someone else might say. It's not a fair way to represent the site to its readership or participants. If you say, "Ah, my party will probably only be three of us, I better pay 100 people to stand around so that I don't look bad", do people normally think this is an honest practice? You're still perpetrating a deception that could have real consequences.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
franzus 14y ago
Community building 101. If you want to start a forum you have to fill it with content first to attract real users.
antithesis 14y ago
One self is not enough.
EnderMB 14y ago
I've worked with a number of large forums with several million users before, and this is often viewed as the best practice thing to do when starting out. Sites like Reddit are more sophisticated than your average vBulletin forum, but I imagine the principles are fairly similar.
- seunosewa 14y ago
  Large forums with several million users are, by definition, NOT just starting out, so I'm not sure this experience is relevant.
  - EnderMB 14y ago
    My mistake. I should have stressed that these forums started out with no user base, and some of them without an original site.
CompiledCode 14y ago
I am fairly certain they still use "fake" submissions (and paid users) to great effect. Recently a user "karmanaut" was exposed as systematically taking the highest-ranking comment of a previous picture submission and adding it to the picture when it was resubmitted (resubmissions on reddit are fairly common, yet they do make the frontpage again and again). It was clearly done with the help of a bot. The moderators initially deleted the thread that pointed to his shenanigans. A lot of front page submissions originate from the same dozen-or-so people who are apparently on reddit all day long. I would not be surprised if - just like owners of YouTube channels - there are content creators in reddit that get paid as such. If it works, it works.
maked00 14y ago
The take away here is not that they start social sites with fake content, but that in all probability, they never stop faking content and filtering the real input. Boiler-room astro-turfing operations are SOP now for marketing operatives in both the commercial and the political venues. The basic architecture of social sites is so wide open to miss-representation and gaming, its a marketers wet dream.
harrisreynolds 14y ago
PG probably did the same things with HN. :-)
- minimax 14y ago
  No but there was a user called nickb that was responsible for a disproportionate amount of content (excellent content) back in the day. There was a lot of speculation that nickb and pg were one in the same. Here are some posts for context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858
  - lupatus 14y ago
    Thanks! I had completely forgotten about nickb!
    - qohen 14y ago
      nickb...as in Nicholas Bourbaki, perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki Edit: someone else who thought about this (much) earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428
      - qohen 14y ago
        And this would seem to prove it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109 A guy named Roth wrote a post, that got posted to HN, about pg's essay on how to disagree. pg responds. Husafan starts a dialog with pg. There's a response back, clearly continuing the dialog, saying "I felt like I gave that aspect of his post the reply it deserved", referring to "my essay", etc. but instead of being posted under pg's handle, the response is posted by nickb. A little further down the thread, user ncart makes the connection: holy sh*t!!! nickb = pg ????
- stonemetal 14y ago
  I don't think he did. It started with a built in community, the people in the YC program. In fact at first it was Startup News not HN.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
Cue up the "how dare they fool me!" comments. I probably over-think things way too much, but every app or project I've created from scratch has caused me to ask myself questions about ethics and morality. Should I put that bogus badge on the site that says it's virus free? I know that it is, but does the fake badge turn me into somebody who's trying to "get one over" on the reader? Should I ask friends to participate in a discussion they normally wouldn't? Is it okay to pay somebody to write an article on my blog? And so on. Some of these questions I've answered yes, some no. Many answers depend on the circumstances. There's a reason you'd be an idiot to listen too closely to the HN crowd when forming your startup. If you did, you'd end up writing something everybody thought was the latest hot app and doing it in such a way as that it would never work. You end up chasing peer approval and executing in ways that you remain sure that people can't attack you. You do this instead of actually making something that people want and executing in the way that ends up helping the biggest number of people. I am not getting into the reddit thing. I've made my peace with it -- if I ever launch a social site I plan on using/hiring accounts to make the place look busy. This is exactly the same as launching a new night-club and paying to have famous people drop by (and then paying for stories about them dropping by appear in the local press). Nobody wants to visit an empty site. So they won't. This is part of the normal operations of running a nightclub, and to me it looks like part of the normal operations of running a social site in the initial stages. (Side note: I can tell you something really weird is going on with Pinterest. I am not sure what -- whether it's just lots of marketers trying to game the system or Pinterest itself that tries to manipulate notifications to elevate engagement, but something's not right there. This kind of thing is par for the course and will continue to be.) I once listened to a tape series on negotiation techniques. The guy made a very appropriate point: there exist these techniques in the world. It's up to you to choose whether to use them or not, however they continue to exist and be used no matter which decision you make. It used to be I would ask myself questions about these techniques and then worry over what the community might think. Any more I still ask myself, and I think long and hard about the answer, but once I've answered them I could care less what the community thinks. Whether that's personal progress or not is open to interpretation. :)

192 points by hornokplease 14y ago

Alexis has posted about this before, a few years ago I think. He has lots of similar things on his blog about how reddit started, eg: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle... The video is worth watching though, it has more insights than just fake users.

kn0thing 14y ago
Aye, more in my GA class, Making Something People Love: http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneurship/making-something-people-love http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...

Mystalic 14y ago

You often have to seed a social site in order for it to be compelling for people to consume. Once they're hooked, then they start submitting. As long as the quality is good, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Ergomane 14y ago
I've built a number of social sites for broadcasting companies and this is indeed common practice. No-one's attracted to a forum filled with void. All you need is a few carefully constructed, interesting personas as a nucleus to kickstart, then gradually remove them once the community has formed around them and becomes self-sustaining.

zainny 14y ago

I'm in a situation where a user-submitted content driven site I'm about to launch is going to be in need of a lot of content to get it kick-started. Has anyone had any experience using services like Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) to do this? Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case.

Alex3917 14y ago
"Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case." You don't need to actually create the accounts by hand, you just need some sort of admin mode that lets you submit content and then attributes it to a different account each time.
- baby 14y ago
  this, I did that for my website. if(ADMIN){ generate a random username from a dictionary (what I did was combining two words from a dictionary of words (english.txt) and then shorting it if was too long). register the user post from his account }
hahla 14y ago
Mturk is great for menial tasks in my experience. ie. Click here, look at this page, and write summary. Even then a portion of users dont follow the instructions properly. I cant imagine using mturk to seed a site with quality content that other real visitors will be looking for. Your better off seeding the content yourself imho.
nostrademons 14y ago
The problem with Mechanical Turk is that you tend to get a lot of low-quality content. If people don't have an emotional investment in the site's success, they'll usually just write drivel and collect their fee. That sets a whole tone for the site which isn't really sustainable. Common approaches I've seen for seeding a UGC site: 1.) Create lots of sock-puppets yourself and write/find the content that you yourself would want to read. Or get your friends to help. Example: Reddit. 2.) Write for your community. Don't worry about being big, just build something you and your friends would want to use. Once they start using it, they'll tell their friends, and you can get big later. Example: LiveJournal, HotOrNot, Fark, many niche sites. 3.) Scrape the hell out of your best competitor and then either provide a better user experience or SEO your site so you rank higher than them. Note that this is almost certainly against their TOS, is probably copyright infringement, and will get you on Google's shit-list, so you're in for a fair amount of pain if you're caught. Examples: Facebook, About.com, YouTube. 4.) Contact a couple celebrities in your field and see if they're willing to let you host their works, or if you can license their works with a revshare/partnership/whatever. All it takes is one really popular author to endorse you, and you'll get the halo effect of lots of less popular authors signing up because they want to be that one. Alternatively, be that celebrity yourself, so that people want to contribute to your site to bask in your reflected glow. Examples: JoelOnSoftware, Hacker News, StackOverflow. 5.) Be an aggregator first, nail your user-experience, and then once you have the visitors coming in, start adding your own hosting as a value-add. Examples: FriendFeed, many Google products. 6.) Throw money at the problem. Examples: Google+, Bing.

Matt_Mickiewicz 14y ago

Fake it until you make it...

yaix 14y ago

The important bit here is "...the type of articles they wanted read. This 'set the tone' for the site as whole." The first few hundred users of your site will determine what kind of users the site will attract, so "being" many of the first few hundred users yourself makes perfect sense, if you want to be guiding your project and not just "hoping for the best".

zach 14y ago
One of the unusual experiences I had growing up in LA was a high school club fundraiser where we all went to a sitcom. Yes, we were hired as a studio audience for an evening. This was clever because they gave us a reason, not just an individual reason but a collective reason, to be there. We felt more engaged with the experience, even when it dragged into the late evening. We actually ended up laughing, at jokes that were not that funny when they ended up on TV. Ultimately, what they did to get us there enhanced the enjoyment of the later users... I mean viewers. I wouldn't hesitate to get early users the same way, for the same reason. Getting people to sit in a seat in a studio and laugh for an evening is basically a solved problem. But getting a sharper-than-average, engaged group of early app or site users is still tough. And it's desperately needed. As others mention, Mechanical Turk is a pretty bad fit. You're probably better off getting a few friends to be sockpuppets (be sure to pick less silly names than "Nutshapio" though). Maybe a startup founder could try taking inspiration from this story to turn their public beta into a fundraiser. Oh, and I can't miss this opportunity to mention the BetaArmy subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BetaArmy http://www.reddit.com/r/BetaArmy That's about it as far as resources I've run across for getting a great first hundred users. So what are the best ways everyone else has found (apart from being in YC)? Does anyone run a service to satisfy this need?
mibbitier 14y ago
It set the tone for the first few months. It used to be about startups, tech, etc in the early days. Now it's all lolpics, atheism, LGBT issues, drugs, anti-corporation/government etc etc. The people who have most time to participate (Out of work, college students, etc) may not necessarily be the people you want...
- 14y ago

cjoh 14y ago

And now Alexis wants to move Congress?

mkramlich 14y ago

This rings true to me. Because one of the things that's shocked me about Reddit, on many occasions, is the great level of comedy, and sometimes just writing in general, in the comment threads. Not all the time, everywhere, of course. But many times I'd be reading threads and thinking, "There are some really talented folks in this thread, comedy/writing-wise, I wonder if any of them are sock puppets? Or moonlighting professionals?" Far above the average quality level you'd see in most other websites. Threads would just scream, "comment ring". Indeed the whole Reddit tradition of novelty accounts (eg. EverythingISayIsALie, InappropriateRemark) feels like something bootstrapped internally before taking off among real endusers. This was just always a sense I've gotten about the site. Nice to hear some evidence that, at last early on, they were doing precisely this kind of thing. Perhaps it's still happening.

wging 14y ago
On that note, did you know that Trapped_In_Reddit scavenges the top comments from earlier postings and reposts them? This was a big thing just a few days ago. http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/v6wz7/worst_hunting_dog_ever/c51v7sm http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/v6wz7/worst_hunting_d...
staunch 14y ago
Pretty sure they didn't start almost any of the memes. I think they mostly did the fakery in the very early days, even before there were comments.
- franzus 14y ago
  Yep, reddit is 4chan for soccer moms. There's not much real creativity going on there.
ShardPhoenix 14y ago
The concept of novelty accounts goes back to the earliest days of electronic text-based communication, and probably back to newspaper letter columns and whatnot before that.

GigabyteCoin 14y ago

This sounds pretty similar to the plenty of fish story. Casinos have been doing it for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling I say good job boys.

rwhitman 14y ago

I have a social travel product (http://wherescool.com http://wherescool.com) that I launched in 2009 with a team composed of 65+ "writer interns" I found off of the NYC Craigslist jobs section. We filled up the site with so much quality content it was written up by the NY Times within a few weeks. Pretty sure I was inspired by Reddit at the time, and also Yelp which actually was mostly seeded by paid writers in the early days. There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to dabble in...

matt312 14y ago
It seems difficult to get such a large team of quality writers. Did you pay them?
- rwhitman 14y ago
  Nope. Everyone was an aspiring writer so the quality was significantly better than most user generated content
  - exim 14y ago
    But after you get (or got already?) substantial income, I think you should buy them a beer, at least.
    - rwhitman 14y ago
      I have bought more than a few of them lunch / dinner when they're in town, some of the top writers I've written recommendations for and helped them find jobs. But it wasn't because of any substantial income, those nice lunches & dinners probably got me a net operating loss for the year...
  - maayank 14y ago
    How did you pitch it to them?
    - 14y ago

zafriedman 14y ago

I'm sorry for saying no more than this because it certainly doesn't contribute much to the discussion, but this wasn't really a secret.

napolux 14y ago

Also in Italy is a common strategy to fill of "paid content" such kind of sites (and also blog & forums) right after launch. It makes sense, indeed.... Who wants to partecipate to an empty reddit?

nkurz 14y ago

I'm surprised that this behaviour seems to be tolerated. Yes, it works, but so do a lot of other slimy subterfuges and shady business practices. I'm steadfastly of the opinion that if you can't be honest about how you are doing it, it shouldn't be done, and shouldn't be condoned. I do not believe that ends justify means. Lies and deceit make for a lousy foundation. Would the site really have been worse off if the same posts had been submitted under the founders' real names? Instead of starting out with false pretenses, could they have encouraged their friends to contribute? I think once one goes down this path, the success of the whole endeavor is tainted. Yes, crime frequently pays and cheaters often win, but that's something that we as a community should work to change.

raheemm 14y ago
crime frequently pays and cheaters often win That is a severe judgement. I see it more as a clever hack. Building a community site or a marketplace is the age old chicken and egg problem. Without an existing community, you cant get users. And without users you cant build a community.
jcc80 14y ago
Kevin Rose first mentioned Digg as being a site that belonged to one of his friend's instead of saying "Check out my new site Digg!" Both Reddit & Digg would have been worse off if the founders didn't do what they did. These are social sites and subject to the same kind of first impression biases that we all face in person. Imagine showing up at a party with 2 guys sitting on a couch talking to each other compared to a party with people out front talking, people inside dancing and a small group in the back yard sharing a laugh. Social proof matters & I'd hardly consider this cheating or slimy.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  But it is. People will look at a site like HN, say, "Ah, there are lots of really smart people on here: this guy has done this, that guy has done that, etc.", only to find out it's really just pg arguing with himself. It's deceptive because people believe they are getting 500 independent evaluations when really they're getting 5 original responses times 100 falsifications of what those five people think someone else might say. It's not a fair way to represent the site to its readership or participants. If you say, "Ah, my party will probably only be three of us, I better pay 100 people to stand around so that I don't look bad", do people normally think this is an honest practice? You're still perpetrating a deception that could have real consequences.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

franzus 14y ago

Community building 101. If you want to start a forum you have to fill it with content first to attract real users.

antithesis 14y ago

One self is not enough.

EnderMB 14y ago

I've worked with a number of large forums with several million users before, and this is often viewed as the best practice thing to do when starting out. Sites like Reddit are more sophisticated than your average vBulletin forum, but I imagine the principles are fairly similar.

seunosewa 14y ago
Large forums with several million users are, by definition, NOT just starting out, so I'm not sure this experience is relevant.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  My mistake. I should have stressed that these forums started out with no user base, and some of them without an original site.

CompiledCode 14y ago

I am fairly certain they still use "fake" submissions (and paid users) to great effect. Recently a user "karmanaut" was exposed as systematically taking the highest-ranking comment of a previous picture submission and adding it to the picture when it was resubmitted (resubmissions on reddit are fairly common, yet they do make the frontpage again and again). It was clearly done with the help of a bot. The moderators initially deleted the thread that pointed to his shenanigans. A lot of front page submissions originate from the same dozen-or-so people who are apparently on reddit all day long. I would not be surprised if - just like owners of YouTube channels - there are content creators in reddit that get paid as such. If it works, it works.

maked00 14y ago

The take away here is not that they start social sites with fake content, but that in all probability, they never stop faking content and filtering the real input. Boiler-room astro-turfing operations are SOP now for marketing operatives in both the commercial and the political venues. The basic architecture of social sites is so wide open to miss-representation and gaming, its a marketers wet dream.

harrisreynolds 14y ago

PG probably did the same things with HN. :-)

minimax 14y ago
No but there was a user called nickb that was responsible for a disproportionate amount of content (excellent content) back in the day. There was a lot of speculation that nickb and pg were one in the same. Here are some posts for context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858
- lupatus 14y ago
  Thanks! I had completely forgotten about nickb!
  - qohen 14y ago
    nickb...as in Nicholas Bourbaki, perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki Edit: someone else who thought about this (much) earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428
    - qohen 14y ago
      And this would seem to prove it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109 A guy named Roth wrote a post, that got posted to HN, about pg's essay on how to disagree. pg responds. Husafan starts a dialog with pg. There's a response back, clearly continuing the dialog, saying "I felt like I gave that aspect of his post the reply it deserved", referring to "my essay", etc. but instead of being posted under pg's handle, the response is posted by nickb. A little further down the thread, user ncart makes the connection: holy sh*t!!! nickb = pg ????
stonemetal 14y ago
I don't think he did. It started with a built in community, the people in the YC program. In fact at first it was Startup News not HN.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

Cue up the "how dare they fool me!" comments. I probably over-think things way too much, but every app or project I've created from scratch has caused me to ask myself questions about ethics and morality. Should I put that bogus badge on the site that says it's virus free? I know that it is, but does the fake badge turn me into somebody who's trying to "get one over" on the reader? Should I ask friends to participate in a discussion they normally wouldn't? Is it okay to pay somebody to write an article on my blog? And so on. Some of these questions I've answered yes, some no. Many answers depend on the circumstances. There's a reason you'd be an idiot to listen too closely to the HN crowd when forming your startup. If you did, you'd end up writing something everybody thought was the latest hot app and doing it in such a way as that it would never work. You end up chasing peer approval and executing in ways that you remain sure that people can't attack you. You do this instead of actually making something that people want and executing in the way that ends up helping the biggest number of people. I am not getting into the reddit thing. I've made my peace with it -- if I ever launch a social site I plan on using/hiring accounts to make the place look busy. This is exactly the same as launching a new night-club and paying to have famous people drop by (and then paying for stories about them dropping by appear in the local press). Nobody wants to visit an empty site. So they won't. This is part of the normal operations of running a nightclub, and to me it looks like part of the normal operations of running a social site in the initial stages. (Side note: I can tell you something really weird is going on with Pinterest. I am not sure what -- whether it's just lots of marketers trying to game the system or Pinterest itself that tries to manipulate notifications to elevate engagement, but something's not right there. This kind of thing is par for the course and will continue to be.) I once listened to a tape series on negotiation techniques. The guy made a very appropriate point: there exist these techniques in the world. It's up to you to choose whether to use them or not, however they continue to exist and be used no matter which decision you make. It used to be I would ask myself questions about these techniques and then worry over what the community might think. Any more I still ask myself, and I think long and hard about the answer, but once I've answered them I could care less what the community thinks. Whether that's personal progress or not is open to interpretation. :)