
Is anyone using bots to make their social site look busy?  If so, how do the bots work?  Are users told that they may encounter bots? - amichail

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pg
Y Combinator is:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTy_smY3sw&NR;](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTy_smY3sw&NR)

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mukund
Impressive stuff. All these humanoids and robots used to be forte of japanese
and its good that there are more advanced stuffs in here. One japanese guy had
joked to me once saying that all those outdated stuff in japan comes to US.
Now i think he wil soon take back his words

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zaidf
That's a rotten business that has to use bots to make the site look busy.
After a while you will start believing that those bots are actually users and
think your site is being used by 1000s of people - until reality hits you some
sunny day. Instead invest that time in getting users. It's not easy - but
neither is it THAT hard!

At least when you catch some sort of fire and start getting a decent stream of
traffic, it will be something you can be proud of and build on.

About dating sites using bots - states are now enacting laws to regulate that.
Watch out.

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nostrademons
I dunno about bots, but almost every social website I know is bootstrapped by
having the founders comment back and forth with each other. There was an
interview with Reddit where they said their first 2 months basically consisted
of the two of them submitting every link they could find to their own site.

When I was at inAsphere.com, the first thing we did after launch was "Okay, I
want every staff member to create at least 5 fake personas, and have
conversations with yourselves." So we created accounts and came up with
backgrounds and personalities and stuff, and had mock arguments with ourselves
on the forums.

I know cross-x.com started the same way, since it was by the same founder.

The only website I've been involved with which _didn't_ seed things with a
bunch of fake usernames was FictionAlley. That was largely because the site
was intended to be personal, for a few friends only, and only randomly
happened to catch on among the general fandom. Since it was started with more
than a dozen founders, they had ample material to begin with.

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zaidf
True. I can relate to that. I personally have launched quite a few sites but
if I can't get initial traction, I usually go back to the drawing board and
figure out why or fold them - so clearly I have a bias against this business
of fake personas and bots.

I was involved with a dot com back in 2001 where I did an internship. Our
first week consisted of all the staff members(there were about 10 of them)
creating accounts and contributing. BUT THAT WASN'T THE SITE'S MAIN MARKETING
PLAN. That is what you have to understand. Bots and fake personas have very
limited lifetime; at the end you have to get real users to make your site of
some worth.

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nostrademons
Of course; a site that's just the staff commenting back and forth to each
other is really a circlejerk, not a webapp. That's what killed inAsphere: it
really wasn't all that interesting. Even after getting all sorts of publicity,
we weren't retaining visitors. And our existing userbase (we folded
cross-x.com into it) was _leaving_ not bringing their friends in.

But there's a difference between a site that sucks no matter what you do and a
site that could survive on its own if only it passed the initial attracting-
users hurdle. Reddit's a good example of the latter: I checked it out about a
week after it launched, and it was really quite boring. I came back a few
months later, and it actually had a thriving community. If the Reddit founders
hadn't stuck with it and just folded the site, they'd be out a few million
dollars.

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mukund
Smarter part of social networking is get your employees for free ;D If you
employ people and engage them in content management or info retrieval..it
would end up being a costly affair. Instead allowing users to push in content
is a smarter way to get traffic plus getting things for free. Now using a bot
inside such a site would repeal traffic as they would view anything and
everything as a bot. No one wants to talk to bots, they want to interact with
a smarter being like them.

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yaacovtp
Bots and fake profiles suck and your visitors will smell them a mile away.

Throw a party for your friends, have them all bring laptops and make up a
drinking game around posting things to Study Stickies. Or you could just ask
them to do it. You should throw up an "About/How to/FAQ/Tour" to explain what
your site is.

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amichail
BTW, do you object to the use of bots in <http://espgame.org?>

Did you even know that it uses bots sometimes?

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yaacovtp
Yes, they use bots to beat cheaters <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf>

That's different than using bots to interact with legitimate users.

Watch Luis von Ahn's presentation of the ESP game at
[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q;=carnegie+mellon+image+game.](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=carnegie+mellon+image+game.)
It's very entertaining and you'll even learn why spammers host free porn sites
even though they aren't in the porn business.

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amichail
From the paper:

"Having pre-recorded game play is especially useful when the game is still
gaining popularity. When there are few players, only a single person will
usually be playing the game at a time."

So the ESP Game does use bots to make the site look busy.

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timg
Yes, we have. But instead of within the site itself, we circulated the
screenames of IM chatbots which then directed traffic to the site. Not one of
those garbage "eliza" bots either, this was of custom design and worked
nicely.

Let me know if you're interested in more technical details.

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rms
I've seen dating sites for sale that come loaded with fake profiles.
Generally, it seems like a really bad idea.

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amichail
How did you know the profiles were fake?

The idea is to make the bots convincing.

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rms
I mean, I've seen a commodity dating site script available that came with an
option for generating fake profiles.

