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."

Comments

Le first post

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't say

Who says they stopped?

[cephalien]

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.

Re:Who says they stopped?

[girlintraining]

ever see a single dollar bill in a tip jar? Priming isn't new.

Well, I have.. I took all the other bills out when the cashier had his back turned. :D Everything I learned, I learned from Batman movies.

Re:Who says they stopped?

[UnknownSoldier]

> Been to r/circlejerk, lately? :)

You mean there is a difference from reddit? ;-) /me ducks

Re:Who says they stopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Matchmaking sites do the same thing

[DNS-and-BIND]

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".

You mean to tell me...

[Hatta]

There are real people behind those posts now?

Same with their up/down voting

[LulzAndOrder]

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.

Re:Same with their up/down voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you're just an asshole and, indeed, nobody cares about what you have to say.

Re:Same with their up/down voting

[Johann Lau]

I don't mind stuff getting voted down, any reader worth their salt reads at -1 (or highlights text on HN) anyway. But hellbanning for fuck all? Slowbanning for even less, for basically "not cheering instantly" --- wow haha. I'm a potty mouth, and I can see how my first accounts were expelled, but seriously, from then on I tried to behave better, but just for disagreeing or pointing out hypocrisy --- BAM, slowban, then log out and you realize your posts don't even show up for anyone. It's so petty and stupid it's hilarious. "Spammers and trolls" my ass -- that's a spineless echo chamber if I've ever seen one. And they even call themselves hacker news of all things.

Oh well, fuck these clowns. It kinda made me realize how good slashdot is all over again (you can say what you want about it, but at least it's not squeamish and deceptive); I'm just "ranting" about it here because well, I can't do it there :P

Re:Same with their up/down voting

[ffflala]

I was trying to be polite, but I suppose I'll have to be blunt. Your description leaves a much more plausible explanation than your claim that a group of editors tracks every new post for some proper "tone" that you occasionally are just too rebellious to match.

It seems much, *much* more likely to me that instead, you occasionally come off like a self-righteous, unbearably narcissistic ass who grossly overestimates his own cleverness and the value of his opinion, and whose comments, once modded to -1, simply aren't worth wasting any time nor effort moderating further. In other words, people --occasionally-- simply aren't that interested in bothering with what you have to say on those occasions when you feel justified in acting out.

Re:just another flash in the pan

[Anonymous Coward]

I preferred Web 3.11 for Workgroups instead.

Re:just another flash in the pan

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Ask yourself...

[jd]

No, I'm complex. Or maybe quaternion.

Re:Fake /. comment

[jalet]

> Setting the desired tone? Gates bad. Torvalds good. Portman hot. Jobs cold.

FTFY