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Reddit Cofounder Says Site Was Built By a Horde of Fake Accounts

Posted by samzenpus on from the setting-the-tone dept.

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."

3 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Matchmaking sites do the same thing by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!
  2. Same with their up/down voting by LulzAndOrder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Who says they stopped? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    r/depression was really helpful to me. At least, I'm still alive because of them.