
How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts - hornokplease
http://www.dailydot.com/business/steve-huffman-built-reddit-fake-accounts/
======
nkurz
I'm surprised that this behaviour seems to be tolerated. Yes, it works, but so
do a lot of other slimy subterfuges and shady business practices. I'm
steadfastly of the opinion that if you can't be honest about how you are doing
it, it shouldn't be done, and shouldn't be condoned. I do not believe that
ends justify means. Lies and deceit make for a lousy foundation.

Would the site really have been worse off if the same posts had been submitted
under the founders' real names? Instead of starting out with false pretenses,
could they have encouraged their friends to contribute? I think once one goes
down this path, the success of the whole endeavor is tainted. Yes, crime
frequently pays and cheaters often win, but that's something that we as a
community should work to change.

~~~
john_flintstone
That's an extremely naive attitude. It's next to impossible (won't say
completely) to start an online community without seeding it first. Forums in
particular - you cannot get a forum going without seeding it with made up
posts and comments, it simply won't happen. Nobody will comment on an empty
forum or discussion board - nobody.

~~~
MortenK
This is entirely wrong. From personal experience, I've seen one of our forums
for a utility app, grow a nice little community with not so much as a single
false post. Users started appearing by themselves after having tried out the
app, and we ended up with a decent, albeit small community on the forum.
There's plenty of other forums as well, that grows from a small group of real
users. Hell, every subreddit starts like that, except apparently for the first
ones populated only by the reddit founders.

~~~
ahage16
I think a forum for an app is a bit different because it has a specific topic
that makes people seek it out. No one is going to stay on a new discussion
forum if it has no users and there are more options. Also, subreddits may
start out like that, but have you seen how many are completely deserted?

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yaix
The important bit here is

"...the type of articles they wanted read. This 'set the tone' for the site as
whole."

The first few hundred users of your site will determine what kind of users the
site will attract, so "being" many of the first few hundred users yourself
makes perfect sense, if you want to be guiding your project and not just
"hoping for the best".

~~~
mibbitier
It set the tone for the first few months. It used to be about startups, tech,
etc in the early days.

Now it's all lolpics, atheism, LGBT issues, drugs, anti-corporation/government
etc etc.

The people who have most time to participate (Out of work, college students,
etc) may not necessarily be the people you want...

~~~
dspillett
If you are looking at the default front-page, then that can often seem the
case.

But if you create an account (no personal details needed, just a username and
password and there is no "no fake names" rule so there is no personal
information needed) you can change the default selection of sub-groups and you
end up with a rather useful (if still somewhat random) aggregator of
interesting stuff. Those things you liked from the first few months are still
there and if you select just those sub-reddits you care about. Some of the
other stuff will still leak in, but not overly so.

------
citricsquid
Alexis has posted about this before, a few years ago I think. He has lots of
similar things on his blog about how reddit started, eg:
[http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-
smalle...](http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-
biggest)

The video is worth watching though, it has more insights than just fake users.

~~~
kn0thing
Aye, more in my GA class, Making Something People Love:
[http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-
entrepreneursh...](http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-
entrepreneurship/making-something-people-love)

------
rwhitman
I have a social travel product (<http://wherescool.com>) that I launched in
2009 with a team composed of 65+ "writer interns" I found off of the NYC
Craigslist jobs section. We filled up the site with so much quality content it
was written up by the NY Times within a few weeks.

Pretty sure I was inspired by Reddit at the time, and also Yelp which actually
was mostly seeded by paid writers in the early days.

There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to
dabble in...

~~~
matt312
It seems difficult to get such a large team of quality writers. Did you pay
them?

~~~
rwhitman
Nope. Everyone was an aspiring writer so the quality was significantly better
than most user generated content

~~~
exim
But after you get (or got already?) substantial income, I think you should buy
them a beer, at least.

~~~
rwhitman
I have bought more than a few of them lunch / dinner when they're in town,
some of the top writers I've written recommendations for and helped them find
jobs.

But it wasn't because of any substantial income, those nice lunches & dinners
probably got me a net operating loss for the year...

------
DanielBMarkham
Cue up the "how dare they fool me!" comments.

I probably over-think things way too much, but every app or project I've
created from scratch has caused me to ask myself questions about ethics and
morality. Should I put that bogus badge on the site that says it's virus free?
I know that it is, but does the fake badge turn me into somebody who's trying
to "get one over" on the reader? Should I ask friends to participate in a
discussion they normally wouldn't? Is it okay to pay somebody to write an
article on my blog? And so on. Some of these questions I've answered yes, some
no. Many answers depend on the circumstances.

There's a reason you'd be an idiot to listen too closely to the HN crowd when
forming your startup. If you did, you'd end up writing something everybody
thought was the latest hot app and doing it in such a way as that it would
never work. You end up chasing peer approval and executing in ways that you
remain sure that people can't attack you. You do this instead of actually
making something that people want and executing in the way that ends up
helping the biggest number of people.

I am not getting into the reddit thing. I've made my peace with it -- if I
ever launch a social site I plan on using/hiring accounts to make the place
look busy. This is exactly the same as launching a new night-club and paying
to have famous people drop by (and then paying for stories about them dropping
by appear in the local press). Nobody wants to visit an empty site. So they
won't. This is part of the normal operations of running a nightclub, and to me
it looks like part of the normal operations of running a social site in the
initial stages. (Side note: I can tell you something really weird is going on
with Pinterest. I am not sure what -- whether it's just lots of marketers
trying to game the system or Pinterest itself that tries to manipulate
notifications to elevate engagement, but something's not right there. This
kind of thing is par for the course and will continue to be.)

I once listened to a tape series on negotiation techniques. The guy made a
very appropriate point: there exist these techniques in the world. It's up to
you to choose whether to use them or not, however they continue to exist and
be used no matter which decision you make.

It used to be I would ask myself questions about these techniques and then
worry over what the community might think. Any more I still ask myself, and I
think long and hard about the answer, but once I've answered them I could care
less what the community thinks. Whether that's personal progress or not is
open to interpretation. :)

------
CompiledCode
I am fairly certain they still use "fake" submissions (and paid users) to
great effect.

Recently a user "karmanaut" was exposed as systematically taking the highest-
ranking comment of a previous picture submission and adding it to the picture
when it was resubmitted (resubmissions on reddit are fairly common, yet they
do make the frontpage again and again). It was clearly done with the help of a
bot. The moderators initially deleted the thread that pointed to his
shenanigans.

A lot of front page submissions originate from the same dozen-or-so people who
are apparently on reddit all day long. I would not be surprised if - just like
owners of YouTube channels - there are content creators in reddit that get
paid as such.

If it works, it works.

------
Mystalic
You often have to seed a social site in order for it to be compelling for
people to consume. Once they're hooked, then they start submitting.

As long as the quality is good, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

~~~
Ergomane
I've built a number of social sites for broadcasting companies and this is
indeed common practice.

No-one's attracted to a forum filled with void. All you need is a few
carefully constructed, interesting personas as a nucleus to kickstart, then
gradually remove them once the community has formed around them and becomes
self-sustaining.

------
GigabyteCoin
This sounds pretty similar to the plenty of fish story.

Casinos have been doing it for years:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill#Gambling>

I say good job boys.

------
maked00
The take away here is not that they start social sites with fake content, but
that in all probability, they never stop faking content and filtering the real
input.

Boiler-room astro-turfing operations are SOP now for marketing operatives in
both the commercial and the political venues.

The basic architecture of social sites is so wide open to miss-representation
and gaming, its a marketers wet dream.

------
zafriedman
I'm sorry for saying no more than this because it certainly doesn't contribute
much to the discussion, but this wasn't really a secret.

------
Matt_Mickiewicz
Fake it until you make it...

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zainny
I'm in a situation where a user-submitted content driven site I'm about to
launch is going to be in need of a lot of content to get it kick-started. Has
anyone had any experience using services like Mechanical Turk
(<https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome>) to do this?

Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be
quite a heavy burden in my case.

~~~
nostrademons
The problem with Mechanical Turk is that you tend to get a lot of low-quality
content. If people don't have an emotional investment in the site's success,
they'll usually just write drivel and collect their fee. That sets a whole
tone for the site which isn't really sustainable.

Common approaches I've seen for seeding a UGC site:

1.) Create lots of sock-puppets yourself and write/find the content that you
yourself would want to read. Or get your friends to help. Example: Reddit.

2.) Write for your community. Don't worry about being big, just build
something you and your friends would want to use. Once they start using it,
they'll tell their friends, and you can get big later. Example: LiveJournal,
HotOrNot, Fark, many niche sites.

3.) Scrape the hell out of your best competitor and then either provide a
better user experience or SEO your site so you rank higher than them. Note
that this is almost certainly against their TOS, is probably copyright
infringement, and will get you on Google's shit-list, so you're in for a fair
amount of pain if you're caught. Examples: Facebook, About.com, YouTube.

4.) Contact a couple celebrities in your field and see if they're willing to
let you host their works, or if you can license their works with a
revshare/partnership/whatever. All it takes is one really popular author to
endorse you, and you'll get the halo effect of lots of less popular authors
signing up because they want to be that one. Alternatively, be that celebrity
yourself, so that people want to contribute to your site to bask in your
reflected glow. Examples: JoelOnSoftware, Hacker News, StackOverflow.

5.) Be an aggregator first, nail your user-experience, and then once you have
the visitors coming in, start adding your own hosting as a value-add.
Examples: FriendFeed, many Google products.

6.) Throw money at the problem. Examples: Google+, Bing.

~~~
sophacles
I thought facebook seeded by selling itself as a service to be the directory++
for colleges et al, for a long time you needed a .edu email to sign up, and
many colleges just signed people up as part of enrollment. Only later did they
change to everyone, all the time (ca 2007 iirc).

~~~
nostrademons
Facebook initially started by downloading the photos off the individual house
websites at Harvard. They were banned pretty quickly, but it got them
attention. I think they switched to user-uploaded photos fairly soon
afterwards (though I think a coworker told me that they were still scraping
photos while they were Harvard-only); they'd definitely stopped by the time
they got to Amherst in Oct 2004.

~~~
objclxt
That was Facemash, rather than Facebook. Facemash was a 'hot or not' style
site that Zuckerberg put together. I don't think Facebook ever actually
scraped content for seeding purposes.

To be honest, the rate stuff spreads over campus list-servs I really don't
think it was required at that point.

------
EnderMB
I've worked with a number of large forums with several million users before,
and this is often viewed as the best practice thing to do when starting out.
Sites like Reddit are more sophisticated than your average vBulletin forum,
but I imagine the principles are fairly similar.

~~~
seunosewa
Large forums with several million users are, by definition, NOT just starting
out, so I'm not sure this experience is relevant.

~~~
EnderMB
My mistake. I should have stressed that these forums started out with no user
base, and some of them without an original site.

------
cjoh
And now Alexis wants to move Congress?

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napolux
Also in Italy is a common strategy to fill of "paid content" such kind of
sites (and also blog & forums) right after launch. It makes sense, indeed....
Who wants to partecipate to an empty reddit?

------
harrisreynolds
PG probably did the same things with HN. :-)

~~~
minimax
No but there was a user called nickb that was responsible for a
disproportionate amount of content (excellent content) back in the day. There
was a lot of speculation that nickb and pg were one in the same. Here are some
posts for context:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99923>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858>

~~~
lupatus
Thanks! I had completely forgotten about nickb!

~~~
qohen
nickb...as in Nicholas Bourbaki, perhaps?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki>

Edit: someone else who thought about this (much) earlier:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428>

~~~
qohen
And this would seem to prove it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109>

A guy named Roth wrote a post, that got posted to HN, about pg's essay on how
to disagree. pg responds. Husafan starts a dialog with pg. There's a response
back, clearly continuing the dialog, saying "I felt like I gave that aspect of
his post the reply it deserved", referring to "my essay", etc. but instead of
being posted under pg's handle, the response is posted by nickb.

A little further down the thread, user ncart makes the connection:

holy sh*t!!! nickb = pg ????

------
antithesis
One self is not enough.

------
mkramlich
This rings true to me. Because one of the things that's shocked me about
Reddit, on many occasions, is the great level of comedy, and sometimes just
writing in general, in the comment threads. Not all the time, everywhere, of
course. But many times I'd be reading threads and thinking, "There are some
really talented folks in this thread, comedy/writing-wise, I wonder if any of
them are sock puppets? Or moonlighting professionals?" Far above the average
quality level you'd see in most other websites. Threads would just scream,
"comment ring". Indeed the whole Reddit tradition of novelty accounts (eg.
EverythingISayIsALie, InappropriateRemark) feels like something bootstrapped
internally before taking off among real endusers.

This was just always a sense I've gotten about the site. Nice to hear some
evidence that, at last early on, they were doing precisely this kind of thing.
Perhaps it's still happening.

~~~
staunch
Pretty sure they didn't start almost any of the memes. I think they mostly did
the fakery in the very early days, even before there were comments.

~~~
franzus
Yep, reddit is 4chan for soccer moms. There's not much real creativity going
on there.

------
franzus
Community building 101. If you want to start a forum you have to fill it with
content first to attract real users.

