
Reddit's Advice On Cheap Marketing - jward
http://static.scribd.com/docs/3vqs035nom704.swf
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amichail
We need a service to seed social sites with users and contributions.

This could be done by paying people or perhaps just agreeing to seed each
other's startups.

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rjb
Interesting... I lean more to the latter, I am usually happy to seed, as you
put it, other startups I find useful, but not necessarily meeting my needs.

I think posting your startup on news.yc allows it to be given a closer look
since the community here is much tighter than most sites. I'm much more
willing to graze past the usual .5 second judgment of any site posted here.

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amichail
In terms of seeding for my site, if let's say 100 people added just one
resource and just one sticky for that resource, then I think the site would
look much better.

This is something that can be done in less than 15 minutes.

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Alex3917
The best is if you take your seed money from a guy whose rich enough to fund
you, but poor enough that he spends all day submitting stories from fake
accounts to make sure he doesn't lose his investment. :-)

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ntoshev
So reddit faked their early users... even though they had pg's readers. A new
social site must get really creative if they consider faking users not ethical
(as I do).

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danteembermage
I can't help being curious; aren't there algorithms that itentify the
likelihood of a sample of text being from a given writer based differences in
writing style. If so we have plenty of writing guaranteed to be from Alexis
and maybe we could identify which accounts were his.

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kn0thing
We didn't have commenting back then, so these were all link submissions. We
basically stopped using these accounts after that first month or so -- once we
started getting traffic.

For us, there didn't appear to be a major ethical dilemma. We used these
accounts simply so that new users would see a front page of links instead of a
blank website (or one with only submissions from 'kn0thing' and 'spez'). For a
site like reddit, it seemed to be a key part of showing new users how the site
worked. Once we got traffic (from places like YC and PG) we stopped needing
these accounts and thus stopped using them.

~~~
ntoshev
Without writing comments it is probably Ok for me as well. Voting is still
somewhat about faking other people's opinions, but there is obviously a large
grey area here.

