Reddit Cofounder Says Site Was Built By a Horde of Fake Accounts 192
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."
I knew it (Score:3, Informative)
Everyone on Facebook and LinkedIn is fake too.
Not really new news (Score:3, Informative)
I thought this was interesting when I read it in a news.ycombinator.com post from 2010 [ycombinator.com].
Re:Ahhh.... (Score:5, Informative)
Given that they are now a top-100 site, or close to it, it would be pretty stupid to infer anything about Reddit's current user base from the tactics they used in their first few weeks.