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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
Everyone on Facebook and LinkedIn is fake too.
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.
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.
I preferred Web 3.11 for Workgroups instead.
With this new web 3.3 society
You must have some kind of pre-release. I'm still on web 2.0.4-RC2. I think the 3.x series has more we- scale techonlogies like nosql and cloud. That will allow us to leverage javascript on every teir to make a thicker thin client with rich apps using HTML6 technology with XML for unstructured social tags. This is perfect for enterprise.
I'm looking forward to the upgrade.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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!)
No, I'm complex. Or maybe quaternion.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Digg was destroyed by its owner. Slashdot and Reddit survive by... well doing nothing. How long did Slashdot go with it's appalling mess of code? And the moment they tried to clean things up including the interface... nothing but complaints! Sometimes if it ain't broke don't fix it (except secretly behind the scenes). Hell, I live in France where fax is still more respected than email.
The only reason Slashdot is dying is dilution. Nobody wants to watch TV, we don't have time, and the previous poor quality of submissions and editing was border-line acceptable as it served as a trigger-point for a lively comments thread but the pollution of slashvertisement by timothy etc makes reading bitching threads tiresome.
Getting momentum is tough. I don't think Slashdot or Reddit are going anywhere for now. However as the spectacular demise of Digg shows, things can change pretty quickly.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
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
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.
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.
if the fake accounts were loading ads, yes, otherwise no way
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Well, all I know is I'm not fixed precision. :)
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!
They can remove the fake accounts!
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
I just float around, uncaring of the world below me...
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
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.
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.
Well, FWIW Slashdot has done a lot of effort to kill themselves by trying so much to eliminate the trolls.
When I first came here I had seen several discussion forums before, but what caught my attention was how, from time to time, a really funny troll appeared from nowhere.
Slashdot without trolls is rather bland and uninteresting.
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