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.<p>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.
The important bit here is<p>"...the type of articles they wanted read. This 'set the tone' for the site as whole."<p>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".
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: <a href="http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest" rel="nofollow">http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...</a><p>The video is worth watching though, it has more insights than just fake users.
I have a social travel product (<a href="http://wherescool.com" rel="nofollow">http://wherescool.com</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to dabble in...
Cue up the "how dare they fool me!" comments.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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. :)
I am fairly certain they still use "fake" submissions (and paid users) to great effect.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If it works, it works.
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.<p>As long as the quality is good, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
This sounds pretty similar to the plenty of fish story.<p>Casinos have been doing it for years: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling</a><p>I say good job boys.
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.<p>Boiler-room astro-turfing operations are SOP now for marketing operatives in both the commercial and the political venues.<p>The basic architecture of social sites is so wide open to miss-representation and gaming, its a marketers wet dream.
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 (<a href="https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome" rel="nofollow">https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome</a>) to do this?<p>Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case.
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.
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?
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.<p>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.