
Ask HN: How do sites like Reddit, HackerNews, etc get initial user content? - moretai
If they need user generated content to function, how do they get started? Do they just get their friends to start using the service?
======
jedberg
For reddit, all the content was submitted by Steve and Alexis at first, then
they got a couple of friends to start submitting.

To make submitting for themselves easier, Steve made a special submit page
that would also create an account at the same time, and then make the
submission from that account.

After a while they noticed people they didn't know were submitting, and then
PG mentioned them in an essay and things started taking off.

They knew they had something the first day they didn't have to submit
anything.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Did the founders create sock puppet accounts early on, so new users would get
more comments and votes, and feel like the community was bigger and more
active?

~~~
legohead
Yes, they've admitted as much. [1]

[1] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-
reddit...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-
huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2)

------
always_good
I started a forum by creating a bunch of accounts, talking to myself, and
pampering my first users with my menagerie accounts to make the community seem
like a small charming group even though it was just me.

I was 17, my forum eventually took off, but I don't think I'll ever have the
energy for that again.

~~~
pwaai
engineering user traction on social forums or community is challenging and I
could attest that it most certainly starts out with engineering "chatter"

now I find it's much harder to do because of reddit and large dominating
websites

------
CM30
As someone who's run community sites for a while, there are a couple of ways
these sites get the initial user content. Here's a brief list:

* They post all the content themselves under their own name, until other people start joining. It's not elegant and may not look great at first, but it's worked before.

* Fake accounts are used, with the founder(s) pretending to be a number of individuals. Said fake accounts usually get retired as the site gets more popular (for real).

* Previous friends or contacts are involved. Perhaps they run a company and everyone employed is told to post, maybe they're a celebrity with a fanbase, you know the drill.

* Influencer marketing is used. In other words, they try and incentivise celebrities and popular figures to use the site, assuming their fanbase will follow.

* Promotion sites or services are another option, with a few admins doing 'exchanges' for a bit of extra activity. So you go up to someone else running a similar site, and say that if they post on your site, you'll post on theirs for a while.

* They could also just pay people to post. You can hire random freelancers to post content if you're desperate, or use a paid service where people earn money for signing up and posting X amount of content on so many sites.

* If they're really interested in morally dubious tactics, they can also use tools that imports content from third party sites en masse. Seen a few do this with Yahoo Answers, and I wouldn't be surprised if this stuff existed for other services too.

* They could also buy another site (or twenty) and merge them in to get the appearance of a large community. Seen that happen a lot with tech and gaming sites.

* Finally, they could always just directly incentivise people to join by say, offering money to whoever posts X amount of content or refers lots of new users.

Really, it depends on the site in question. Reddit was initially built on fake
accounts, but that's only one of about a million ways such sites could take
off.

------
blue_bells
These Quora answers give a good hint: [https://www.quora.com/How-did-Reddit-
get-initial-traction](https://www.quora.com/How-did-Reddit-get-initial-
traction)

In particular, it seems like two big factors were:

\- Having influencers (e.g., Paul Graham) onboard, which gets their followers

\- Auto-populating content (fake users) and generating the illusion of
activity so that it doesn't feel like one is entering an empty forum

Getting friends to use a service also makes a lot of sense for social networks
that incubate in small communities (e.g., Facebook), but are a bit harder to
pull off for these diffuse communities like Hacker News.

~~~
egeozcan
> Auto-populating content (fake users) and generating the illusion of activity

The other owner of a project of ours once suggested doing this. I rejected
that because of ethical reasons. I also told that could mean legal trouble.
Was I completely naive/wrong?

~~~
chatmasta
How’d the project go? Did you get any users? I’m going to go ahead and guess
the answer is “no.” So yes, you were naive. Very few social apps (or
marketplace apps even) overcome the chicken/egg problem _without_ some form of
faked content. After all, who’s going to post to an empty forum?

I’ve growth hacked an app to 600k users across 200 communities (colleges).
What worked for us was seeding each new community with enough fake content for
the first few days. After that the real users took over. The most interesting
aspect of that growth hack was that users would post content similar to what
we seeded it with. So we could create the “vibe” of the community with fake
posts, and soon it turned very real.

~~~
bowlich
But that doesn't answer the ethical question. Success and imminent failure are
not a justifications for unethical actions. If success cannot be achieved
without unethical action, then perhaps it is best to fail.

Misrepresenting the nature of the content would certainly fail Kant's
deontological tests.

~~~
chatmasta
I’d like to hear an example of a chicken/egg social app that _did not_ fake
content at the beginning.

If you can’t think of one, or there’s few examples, then there’s also the
ethical consideration to your stakeholders (eg investors). Is it ethical to
forego a legal opportunity to grow your user base? Do you have an obligation
to your investors to do all you can to build a successful product?

My personal ethics revolve around the question of “am I hurting anyone?” I
really can’t imagine how posting fake content to your own forum is hurting
anyone. By I can see how neglecting to take steps to grow your user base could
hurt people (yourself included, if the business fails).

Would you rather that Reddit had never faked content? More likely than not, if
they hadn’t done that, Reddit would not exist today. So isn’t that a net
positive from an ethical perspective?

~~~
bowlich
The weakness in the teaching of ethics, and in particular the lack of
discourse in ethics amongst business in this nation is utterly frustrating.
That you can do something (within the law) or that no moral outrage would
occur is itself not a measure of ethical action.

Not dealing harm is itself a rather weak ethical stance. Ethics doesn't test
whether you do no harm, it tests whether you maximized the good -- and not the
good for you or your investors, but rather the good across all of society.

If anyone holds you to an obligation that entails that you take an unethical
action then such a license itself become immediately void. We can see this
historically expressed by St. Augustine in the 3rd century and more recently
by Martin Luther King Jr. (an unjust law is no law).

Hence, the law itself is not a measure of ethical act. That you _can_ do
something is not itself a justification of ethical action. Only that you
_should_ do something is itself a measure of ethics. In which case you must
provide proof that you _should_ misrepresent yourself and your content.
Returning to Kant. If you cannot universalize the action -- that is to say, if
you cannot show that to create fake content is always a good act (and with all
the rufus about "Fake news," I think we certainly cannot show that fake
content has been universally good).

Jumping into the question of net good we skip from deontology to
utilitarianism. Yet, utilitarianism recognizes that net good is not a measure
of money, or pleasure but can be an abstract measurement. Success of the
business is only a local consideration, you must expand the ethical question
to all of society. That which is good for you or your investors is not itself
a net good for society (nor from a deontological perspective a good unto
itself).

Was the success of Reddit a net positive for society? Had there been no Reddit
would our net quality of life have been improved as a whole society. In this,
I would say Reddit was not a net positive for society. It consolidated a
distributed system of smaller social forums across the internet into a single
hegemonic gated community and consolidating social power into a smaller sum of
hands. And I would argue that consolidation of power into smaller groups
(whether hard or soft power and in this case we are discussing the soft power
of cultural norms) is itself unethical.

~~~
chickenfries
It's so clear that the person you're responding to does not even understand
what "ethical" means. This is usually the point where I give up on hn threads.

------
bananicorn
In the case of reddit I heard, that - at least in the very early stages, the
creators themselves provived a lot of the content, and even hired some people
almost exclusively for that purpose. I can't remember where I read it though.

~~~
Posibyte
Part of the Udemy course Huffman was offering he said this [1] And honestly,
it doesn't bother me all that much. I see it like an engine needing a big
spray of gasoline and a spark before it can run. Just because it didn't start
with pistons running doesn't mean it's a bad engine. I see it more as faking
it till they made it, and it worked. They were their own biggest fans.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/zmeDzx4SUME?t=30s](https://youtu.be/zmeDzx4SUME?t=30s)

~~~
nafizh
*Udacity

~~~
ChristianGeek
[https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--
cs253](https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253)

------
dkersten
HN started small, as you can see from the earliest 5 posts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5)

It essentially started as a small place to share links for the early YC
attendees and slowly grew from there.

~~~
shubhamjain
Amazed to see jacquesm's comment. I knew he was an old member, but it seems
he's been active right from the get-go.

~~~
dkersten
Note that his comment was posted quite a while after the submission (although,
still a long time ago!)

I also just realised my account is a little older than jacquesm's O_o that..
was unexpected.

------
mattbgates
I think when anyone starts anything, they have to begin with their own voice.

I started
[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)
about 5 years ago... I must've written about 10 articles before I even began
the website. I was the only one submitting content to the website for the
first few weeks, but eventually I ran out of ideas, and started soliciting on
Craigslist, and even paid a bunch of people on Fiverr to write articles. I
moved to MyBlogGuest and MyBlogU which were free sources of people looking for
a home for even more articles, and had been publishing up to 3 articles per
day.

After about a year or two, I began receiving at least a half dozen emails a
week from individuals, freelancers, marketers, and universities, including
lawyers, doctors, construction workers, police officers, teachers, and people
from all different professions wanting to submit their confessions (articles).
Emails have only increased, but I've got a good handle on everything.

It has become a daily routine in my life and I've spoken to people from all
over the world, including India, Philippines, Australia, South Africa,
Tunisia, Europe, Canada, etc.

I still write my own articles as I've always got ideas, but I've always got
new people discovering the website or repeat contributors who have been
submitting articles to the website for years.

Even those times where I feel like quitting and no longer keeping up, I can't
let my contributors down, so they keep me motivated to keep it going.

------
petercooper
It's nowhere near the size of those but I have run
[http://www.rubyflow.com/](http://www.rubyflow.com/) for 10 years and it was
basically a month of me posting several things a day and mentioning it on my
then-popular Ruby blog before there was a tipping point where other
contributors kept it going. I rarely post at all now.

On sites that require a social aspect rather than just link sharing, I imagine
you really need to have a core group of people commit to engaging with each
other before others are attracted towards it. I recall early HN being like
that at least.

~~~
geetfun
Love Rubyflow. I was just on that site before surfing over to HN.

------
socialmediaisbs
Reddit's co-founders populated the content themselves. This has been mentioned
in interviews with both Huffman and Ohanian and can usually be found in write-
ups about "Growth hacking."

------
pmoriarty
They fake it 'till they make it.

------
SN76477
By doing jobs that do not scale. Such as submitting the content, and answering
the questions submitted.

By doing things that do not scale, you are able to develop a strategy faster
since you are in the trenches seeing what is most likely to fail.

------
anindha
PG already had a following because of his essays. He shared a link to Reddit
in one of his essays. This allowed them to transition from artificial content
to content from real users.

------
gmiller123456
If you're goal is just to copy an existing established site, you're going to
either have to generate a lot of content yourself or do a ton of advertising.
But, if you're creating something truly new and unique that people will love,
then you'll likely have no problem getting a community to come build around
it.

E.g. Back in 1997 I built a chess website for playing correspondence chess.
There were lots of other sites for playing correspondence chess, but none with
actual enforced time controls, and even the weakly/non-enforced time controls
were very slow (like 1 move every 7 days). Mine was the first where users
could choose their time controls, and the time controls were automatically
strictly enforced. The only advertising I ever did was when it initially
launched was to post in a couple of USENET groups and forums, and it took off
from there. Within a few years sites with deep pockets started popping up with
the same idea,and the sheer number of sites that do the same thing today make
it impossible for a site with no revenue like mine to get any attention. But
even with my almost no advertising, it still got to about 15,000 active users
at its peak, and still has several thousand today.

------
carlchenet
I started Le Journal du hacker [1], the French-speaking Hacker News-like
website 3 years ago. I was mostly alone for one year feeding the website until
the first regular contributors (now co-founders) showed in.

Good things come to those who wait (and work hard).

[1] : [https://www.journalduhacker.net](https://www.journalduhacker.net)

------
eighthnate
Reddit, HN, facebook, etc all had the founders generate content via lots of
accounts until the sites became popular enough that they didn't need to
generate content anymore. Reddit founders even discussed it on many interviews
and of course on reddit itself. I remember years ago, they talked about how
they created a bunch of content and fake accounts in order to generate
interest and to make it seem like reddit was more active than it was.
Essentially, in the beginning, most of the content and most of the comments
were the founders and their friends submitting and responding to their own
comments with a bunch of sock puppet accounts.

Essentially, it's fake it til you make it.

------
dchuk
I think I came up with one way to kickstart a site like that here:
[https://engineered.at/](https://engineered.at/)

It's an HN/Reddit-like front end to essentially an RSS aggregator. Granted,
traffic is still pretty low and I haven't had time to hack on this a bit, but
it does technically solve the chicken and egg problem of needing content for a
community that is meant to produce content.

I've always thought you could set something up like this to make it easier to
find links to post to more "pure" content sites like Reddit from the onset of
the community until traction is found.

~~~
baby
That’s not enough. I’ve been posting crypto/security links here
[https://www.cryptologie.net/links](https://www.cryptologie.net/links) for 2
years and for almost every day and I've been unable to gain any traction. Of
course I don't mind because I'm actually following the news and reading a lot
of these links.

~~~
shyn3
You are doing good. Now go and post some comments, get other accounts to post
comments. Add a summary of the article, maybe use an application that
generates an automated summary.

Create some long tail words and through those into the comments and auto
summary on the page.

That should rank you a bit for some words in your group. Right now, Google is
thinking you are just providing duplicate content.

~~~
baby
> Now go and post some comments, get other accounts to post comments

Yeah that's the problem, I don't want to spend my time doing that.

~~~
CM30
Well tough luck. Sometimes you'll have to do stuff you don't want to do, and
when it comes to running a community, being part of said community (or at
least faking it until one exists) is one of those things.

------
muzani
I've built many successful forums and chat rooms. You don't get "friends", you
usually start off as a fork of an existing community. You first need a group
of people who want to talk about something.

I actually designed some of my communities to have sock puppet accounts. I
never had to use it, because people just clicked and used it.

So if you're going to build a fitness community app, you should probably be in
several fitness WhatsApp groups or Facebook/Reddit groups and so on.

------
captaincrunch
You fake it until you make it, that is how reddit got started.

------
jaclaz
Slightly off-topic, but not much, something I always find very funny, in a
somewhat sad way are the just launched/published sites including (from day
one) the FAQ's (asked by whom?) that besides being often so basic as to border
idiocy, tend to remain the same ones for weeks, months or years, whilst you
cannot find anywhere answers to actually asked (by you) questions.

------
mohsinr
In this video Steve, co founder of Reddit, mentions some tips, steps they did,
like own account creation and submitting links on the fly...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=zmeDzx4SUME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=zmeDzx4SUME)

------
cheeze
Follow up question. How often do sites get their start by "stealing" content
from others?

~~~
LancerSykera
Crunchyroll got started by stealing stolen content. They uploaded high quality
sub group releases to a low quality player without attribution. This is why
there is now a sub "group" called HorribleSubs that is literally just rips off
of Crunchyroll.

------
theklub
Growth hacks, fake it.

------
keinu
Fake users, committing real content

