Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Cofounder Says Site Was Built By a Horde of Fake Accounts
derekmead writes "How, exactly, did Reddit get so big? Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it 'til they made it.' In a video for Udacity, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site's content with tons of fake accounts. These days, with the site's users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content. But early on, Huffman said that using fake accounts driven by the founders was key to building the tone they wanted to the site. Early on the Reddit crew could shape the discourse of the site in the direction they wanted, and as the real user base grew, those standards held allowing the fake accounts to fade away."
You don't say
Well, that's pretty much how market research works, too.
Been to r/circlejerk, lately? :)
Either way, who cares. If it hadn't taken off, they'd just end up as a bunch of weirdos talking to their multiple personalities. But it did, and the same tactic is used all the time - ever see a single dollar bill in a tip jar? Priming isn't new.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Am I real?
Everyone on Facebook and LinkedIn is fake too.
...so my suspicions about using Reddit for anything WERE founded. Glad to know I could see that then.
I heard this is also how World of Warcraft subscriptions stay so outrageously high.
the biggest collection of self-important douchebags on the internet was started using self-important douchebaggery?
never saw that coming.
You can buy a turnkey matchmaking site, complete with a few thousand profiles to get things going. These profiles will even send messages to your "real" users. You can toggle a switch to choose if your users have to pay to see the message, pay to reply, or whatever. There's nothing wrong with what reddit did, even if it went against their own terms of service. What's the phrase..."by any means necessary".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Quoth the top post: "These days, with the site's users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content."
Would someone please explain to me how I'm supposed to parse that sentence? I'm not seeing any way of making it grammatical.
A Nasdaq cofounder admitted today that their site was built by a horde of fake accountants.
There are real people behind those posts now?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The Reddit groupthink is pretty overpowering. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a horde of fake accounts designed to upvote politically favored things and downvote badthink articles right into the memory hole.
I thought this was interesting when I read it in a news.ycombinator.com post from 2010.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
How is this news? I thought this was common knowledge? This has been generally known for YEARS -- and I don't even use Reddit.
Well, that explains why bonch likes it so much.
With this new web 3.3 society it seems people get intensely focused on one site only to migrate to a newer site. Remember Digg? Remember Slashdot? Reddit will get replaced, it's only a matter of time. For me I'm going back to usenet and gopher.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Still today, if you pay attention, you can tell that the tone of the site is maintained by editorial up/down voting. I know, because my tone they hate and it consistently gets one downvote. Not a lot, just the two needed to make it negative. Then if people reply to me, that discussion is not manipulated, but that comment that started my thread sticks with the negative one. It happens over and over. Regular folks can swoop in and pour more ups or downs, but more often than not, there is a "first psas" (ha ha First!) that zooms through right away and keeps the 'jerk tone pristine. Used to be that way on Slashdot too, you can tell by how quickly the needle moves to where it "wants" to be. I don't know any more, I don't pay attention or post.
Setting the desired tone? Gates bad. Torvalds good. Portman hot. Jobs cool.
Ok, we get it, you have a giant hard-on for this bonch guy. We don't need to hear about it every Slashdot article.
Hey bonch. Haven't seen you in a while. Thought maybe your head got so stuck up your ass you'd suffocated. Oh well...
are another.
Fraud, in other words.
Although there is a running joke on 4chan that "there are only two users on this site: moot and this guy named Anonymous who is a real asshole."
So when they started out they intentionally wanted reddit to be a cesspool of misogyny, memes, in-jokes and teenagers? Cool.
Actually, bonch and his sockpuppets are remarkably effective for slashdot user engagement. A first post which is an obvious troll can generate a reply chain of 50-60 responses, even on a 'boring' topic that might otherwise get under 100 normal replies. So there is the argument for having users who can stir the pot.
> Reddit was built by and remains under the control of samefags
lol some community
I hear that sex life is like this as well. Can anyone confirm please?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
So, reddit is admitting they are as fake as digg.com? LOL, dropped both sites a few years back.
Wouldn't what they did constitute fraud and manipulation and put them in an actionable position from their advertisers and/or actual human users, if not criminal in some locales? It's wholly unethical at best and I have been asked to create fake accounts and posts by some of my web clients and have told them so. That's just so wrong on so many levels.
Huh... I would have thought after the semi-debacle that occurred when people exposed Reddit for having subreddits where people openly traded child porn while administrators tacitly stood by and said nothing, that nothing could make me think less of Reddit. I guess this just proves that the site's operators have been disingenuous scumbags since the very beginning.
A computer operating system requires a bootstrapper to load it into memory before it can run.
An engine on an automobile or aircraft requires rotation by an external source before it can power itself.
A business requires capital before it can generate its own.
A social media site requires 'social media' before it can launch.
I loathe the idea of ever living in New York City but would love to live in a ghost town. You know what they say about assumptions, man!
The general population of redditors and their self-masturbatory attention whoring has become annoying enough that I don't bother any more. I used to waste hours a day there, but the signal/noise ratio has turned decidedly flamboyant hipster. The resulting Imgur postings each day, however, are still worth watching, so I just subscribe to those feeds. Funny/Sexy/Nerdy content without the self-pleasuring drivel. Much better way to 'reddit'.
They can remove the fake accounts!
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
who and what is reddit? Never heard of this huge great site lol
In the course of developing a large, scalable, social networking application, one aspect of this is 'Stress Testing', in which, common sense dictates that you need to set-up a staging environment with fake users, and scripts (aka: bots) that act as users interacting with the system.
The fact that they used this practice in production to get attention or mislead and entice real people to use their system, is not that surprising, or un-common. The real news here is that the majority of reddit users are, and have always been, complete morons.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
'Social' sites have been seeding themselves since the beginning. Nobody really wants to join a ghost-town, and no site-owner really wants a free-for-all.
This is less a 'revelation' and more just an acknowledgement of what everyone savvy knew was going on anyway.
Yes, getting a sex life is exactly the same just with a different set of rules.
The first rule is: The more sex you have, the more sex you will get.
The reasoning here is that the more sex you have, the more pheromones you produce. These pheromones then make others around you more interested in you sexually.
So, if you have no partner to have sex with, playing with yourself can increase your own sex drive, drive up the level of hormones you produce, increase the changes of that people you stood next to in the elevator salivating and jumping you (always try to hit the emergency stop button if this happen as coitus interruptus sucks) and as a side benefit gives you a measure of relief.
Unfortunately, it can also put you into a terminal feedback loop where you are never satisfied and are always horny. Such is life. When you reach this point, however, your standards will drop and you will be tempted to shag anything or indeed anyone below your normal level of acceptance.
So, starting out on your own "faking it" by playing with your "joystiq" or "tunnel of love" can very well lead to a sex life that involves others.
Alternatively you could become life me and discover that having a well paid job, casual sex on the side when you need it, no kids, a house paid off in record time and no significant drain on your income other than casual dating and life events is far better than the marriage alternative. YMMV
I LOVE how they made the video and would like to do something similar.
Anyone have any specifics on how they created it so the hand is in the screen capture?
So far I can tell it's a wacom tablet but what's the software & method. Chromakey on the tablet surface?
In other words, the Golden Era of Reddit where there was supposedly more intelectual discussions, content and the lack to rage comics and cat pictures was all fake? Now that Reddit has actual users it's just a shit as 4chan?
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
I have 3 Reddit accounts! And you ?
I really love club dresses ,
Is this a Turing Test or something?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Because I've always known it was true: Everyone else on the Internet is just one big fat guy.
Ever notice some of the common passwords revealed in the password hacks are kind of not that common. Why would 40 accounts have the password Michael and another 40 accounts have the password Jordon? Fake accounts with common passwords duh.
That would make the circle complete.
... because somewhere along the line someone gave them money based on their success, which appears to have been faked for some period of time.
Fire up your lawsuits and get the popcorn ready.
It is harder for guys to "fake it". Finding an excuse to properly heat the yogurt is just plain tough.
Nice rationalizing there, bonch, but not so much when it's mostly offtopic, misleading bullshit that those 50-60 responses are correcting.
It is still that way with a lot of accounts.
andrewsmith for instance
Back in my college radio days, we learned that the best way to get a call-in show rolling was to prime the pump with a number of calls made by station staff themselves.
I suggest http://depressioncomix.tumblr.com/
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reddit is a pro athiest, pro liberal site. religion and conservative issues get voted down so the only spot light you see is when they are mocking it. a fair blog has views from all of society, since gallup poll indicate most americans have christian belief - if reddit was fair then the blog would reflect a lot more of conservative values instead of bashing them all the time. redditors often mis quote the bible and i had to often correct them in their pride of knowing it all- but knowing little about the bible.
the same went for issues of abortion and homosexuality, they promote it.
after reading the manipulation that the site creators , it is now clear that the site was promoting liberalism while silencing conservatism - it is called selective democracy. we want this group to be heard, but we will silence this group. that is why i left reddit. it promotes evil, the people on it are on the verge of insanity and they love it as long as the party keeps going. however, the drug user always runs out and when reality hits, they have to pay for their sin.