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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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yea, I mean its not like the owners of Slashdot NASDAQ: GKNT have any desire to monetize their user base at *all*...
I'd like to say I've never been to reddit, but that's no longer true: I quite enjoyed Mr. Skullhead's AMA thread (Skullhead being one of the creators of KoL; I only went to reddit, and for that matter, only learned what "AMA" meant, because Skully announced it to the whole kingdom that he was doing one.)
Haven't been back since, though. Anyway, since when is requesting that sentences be grammatical English, a sign of pomposity? (Pedantry perhaps. Though, I think of myself as a staunch descriptivist!)
communication occurred, forcing it into a protocol ex post facto is pointless.
Good-bye
Probably not, but I know a few guilds that are staffed primarily by dupe accounts. I.E. people playing 5-10 accounts at once.
People do it all the time, but from the perspective of Blizzard's bottom-line it isn't a huge deal. That person still pays for each of the accounts, so the only real difference is that unlike with 5 people (each with one account), all 5 accounts could disappear at once if the person quits. That is a downside, but not enough that it merits bothering much with, imo.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Duplicate ACCOUNTS? Unlikely; you have to PAY for accounts. But each real cash-paying player may have up to 50 different ALTernate characters. You just can't have all of them online at once.
Given that they are now a top-100 site, or close to it, it would be pretty stupid to infer anything about Reddit's current user base from the tactics they used in their first few weeks.
I hear that sex life is like this as well. Can anyone confirm please?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Multi-boxing has always been common thing in MMOs, for some people if they can justify $14.99 a month for the majority of your entertainment $44.97 doesn't seem to bad ever. It is becoming even more common now that the F2P model is really taking off the barrier to entry is lower to do so.
Really? Your english skills are so bad you can't pull the obvious meaning from that? You can't work out a word to drop to handle the author changing their train of thought in the middle?
I guess my X skills are worse than your English skills since clearly X must be your first language.
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.
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
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.
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.
They're not owned by Nast anymore, they're now a direct subsidiary of its parent company.
Dilbert RSS feed
Yeah. These days the site is basically run by users who managed to get in early enough and become well-know enough that they got moderator positions on the default subreddits - and they run a horde of fake accounts so the users don't have to. Seriously, one of the most prolific moderators (Karmanaut) was actually caught posting replies to his own comments with a sockpuppet to make it look like people agreed with him because he later accidentally sent someone a message from the wrong account.
Tools? Who else would have deliberately shaped the "know nothing, shit-for-brains" hive-mind that is Reddit?
It's like 4chan for jocks.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm sure 4chan was grown the same way.
Is this a Turing Test or something?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I'd say it's more the case of explaining why redditors remember the earliest years containing coherent and knowledgable discussion. You had a focussed audience with a vested interest in getting quality discussion going. When the great unwashed outnumber these quality submissions you get a link aggregator that thinks it's a forum, where every second post is in the form of a badly phrased meme.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
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.
Just for your viewing pleasure http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/12/one-wow-player-controls-36-characters-simultaneously/
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.
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.
Color me astonished; I like playing WoW, but not enough to pay $5,700 per year to do it. I suspect that he's one of the very few who is that idio\\\\dedicated to do so.
The worst case of this was the guy that owned r/jailbait and most of the other creepy pedophile shit. He had a close enough relationship with the site admins that they were very much complicit in that activity continuing as long as it did. Dude had a ton of sockpuppets that he would use to upvote his own posts and bury anyone that criticized him. Reddit groupthink being what it is (which is very much a product of how the site is structured, not related to TFA), he had a pretty significant vocal minority of the userbase convinced that masturbating to the stolen vacation photos of underage girls is socially acceptable behavior by hiding behind the godawful broken internet libertarian misinterpretation of what "free speech" means that's so popular over there.
It was pretty bizarre to see people publicly lament the closing of r/jailbait as some sort of great tragedy of internet censorship taking place on their beloved "free speech site". Sadly, that's what's possible when you give a bunch of people with a (generally frowned upon) shared interest an echo chamber where they can validate and reinforce each other's behavior and silence anyone that disagrees.
I suggest http://depressioncomix.tumblr.com/
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