How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction

264 点作者 pytrin将近 12 年前

17 条评论

A few years back the major tv companies in the UK underwent a scandal involving faking tv phone-in competitions - runners on the show called in pretending to be viewers, calls went unregistered. Almost none was intended to gain pecuniary advantage but it was fraud. I think people went to jail.I fail to see why the same scandal should not be seen hereEdit: Reddit is deception, hard to see fraud. Dating sites with fake profiles are likely to be fraud if its a pay site(AFF sounds outrageous). The odd ball is PayPal - if the eBay supplier got less money from the sale than if they had dealt with a normal user with a credit card the I guess there could be a case for fraud. Be interested in a real lawyers view

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mjburgess将近 12 年前

I think we need to distinguish between "faking", "demonstrating" and "supplying". Faking should be reserved for literally providing false data with the intention that it's believed to be true, eg. the dating site example.Most of those examples were not faking anything. Rentoid actually supplied a serivce, though it wasnt "user-generated". Reddit supplied links their potential users would be interested in.This is a mixture of demonstrating how the service works, and supplying actual content to potential users.By way of contrast, what the dating site admins should have actually done, is ask all their single friends to sign up (and any other single people they could get their hands on directly).It seems a perfectly good and moral business strategy to generate your own content which is representative and useful. I think "faking it" is a bit more questionable.

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liquidcool将近 12 年前

Missed a couple big ones from companies they mentioned. Yelp paid professional reviewers to seed cities they wanted to establish themselves in. To my knowledge they were honest reviews, but people were still put off by it.And the Airbnb spam debacle was left out as well. (<a href="http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/" rel="nofollow">http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...</a>)For the record, I use both services frequently, but those are notable omissions.Really curious how much PayPal dumped into buying eBay items. Doesn't seem like something you could do for long, so I imagine it had to be highly targeted.

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dvdhsu将近 12 年前

Paypal buying eBay items wasn't actually the primary method for stimulating growth. Initially, Paypal offered new users $20 for opening an account, and $20 for referring somebody to open an account. They then dropped the bonus to $10 for both, then $5, then $0. This allowed them to grow immensely, and they reached 100,000 users in one month. These bonuses weren't "cheap" though: they cost PayPal around 60-70 million.Here's a reference - an interview between Elon Musk and Salman Khan: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&feature=player_detailpage#t=682" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&feature=player_de...</a>. It's worth a watch.

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blairbeckwith将近 12 年前

I'm usually not bothered by stuff like this, but let's play some role-reversal."Dating services know what men want (who doesn’t) and seed the network with photos of Latin American models with eclectic interests (not that the latter matters)."In to..."Dating services know what women want (who doesn't) and seed the network with wealthy-looking men with genuine personalities (not that the latter matters)."

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Dogamondo将近 12 年前

This reminds me of the tactics the music industry used to use to gain initial traction for their manufactured groups and artists who had never built up an organic following before being signed. Case in point is Lou Pearlman's creation, Backstreet Boys, who's first album and titular single was called "Backstreet's Back", with lyrics that alluded to the fact that they had been around for a while and were making a 'comeback'. Their music video was noted for having a mass of adoring, screaming female fans chasing them down the street and going silly over them. This was before they were even known, but eventually became a reality.

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dfritsch将近 12 年前

I think that this is an obvious extension of what new businesses have been doing for decades. If you open a storefront, you would do a soft opening to test the idea and then a grand opening to generate traffic.If I was having a grand opening, I would get every friend there, even if they would never shop at my business, to make the place seem full and busy during the "party".Obviously this is not on the scale of a start up, but I think the idea of faking initial interest is actually common for any business.The article hints at how sinister your faking is seems to affect how much backlash you get from it.

hsuresh将近 12 年前

Another way of looking at what reddit did, is to think of them as hacking a way to provide value to the initial users. Faking doesn't necessarily have to be about lying, it can be used to provide value, even though the system is designed to work well only when there is a significant userbase.

Tossrock将近 12 年前

So the meta-story is that that's what medium.com is doing right now, right?

volume将近 12 年前

I forget where I read it, but "Pud" of FckedCompany and Adbrite fame explained how he used to run a BBS back in the day and the techniques (similar to the blog post) he used to get traffic carried over into how he got traction for FckedCompany.

leokun将近 12 年前

This is the kind of bullshit advice you get from (non-pg) mentors at YC and places like 500-startups. Such advice has a few traits:* It's too general to be of any use to you.* It's too specific to be of any use to you.* It's stuff so obvious you've probably already tried it and it obviously hasn't worked for you.If there was a formula that worked, everyone would do it. There isn't, so general, vague sounding bullshit is the order of the day. They might as well be prescribing hanging garlic from your door. You get a couple of people who have seen success one way or another, usually through being at the right place at the right time with the right idea in a situation of extreme uniqueness, and they are never helpful. At least not strategically. They probably are helpful in terms of the business of startups: management and fundraising etc.I think the real lesson is to just build your idea as best as you can and if there's traction it'll work, if there's signal follow it, if you don't get anywhere quickly, try harder or try something else. Or give up.

khadim将近 12 年前

So should every startup fake their way to traction?

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cmbaus将近 12 年前

I remember years ago, I had a blog entry hit the homepage of Reddit: <a href="http://baus.net/rails-wrong-language/" rel="nofollow">http://baus.net/rails-wrong-language/</a> . I think the user that posted it was Linuxer or something like that. But the account had a ton of karma and there was some question if it was just a bot run by Reddit.

omegant将近 12 年前

This post is perfectly timed for us. We are trying to rise a market place and it´s really difficult to go beyond the egg and chiken problem. Even more if the model is new and there is no data to support our point.

nkurz将近 12 年前

Judging from the comments so far, I'm guessing I'm in the minority. But from my point of view, all of the practices described are duplicitous and unacceptable. Yes, there is a differentiation between 'faking' and 'fraud', but this is a legal distinction. Morally, they are equally offensive. Unquestionably, lies and deceit can be useful in achieving business success. This does not mean that they should be condoned, much less encouraged.