Listen to Steve Huffman tell the story of how Reddit got started

Yes.

This is what I remember from the earliest days. Back and forth between their own posts using multiple accounts to give the impression of active engagement and a growing community. Reposting things from Digg, Fark, etc and grabbing memes like Rickrolls, goatse, to draw eyeballs and clicks to their single page scrolling interface.

Dodging bullshit posts was a game of waiting for comments to post so you could see which actually had real content and not some nasty meme from somewhere else.

Deciding that they needed a coat of arms and figuring out what should go on it, the alien, narwhals, etc.

I'm winding down my participation. It's been a fun ride for the most part but it is really easy to get depressed reading a lot of stuff that gets posted.

Discussions tend to deteriorate quickly and quality comments with sources get buried. That isn't how it all started. I'll shut down my last account soon after overwriting and deleting all the posts.

It's fitting that Imgur is also gonna scratch all the content they have from people who never made Imgur accounts. I have a lot of tutorials, marked-up photos, etc that I used to help people thru issues on some of those niche forums involving home and auto repairs. It's good to know all that will be gone.

I'll be down to one site for online engagement and news.

Lol HN didn't exist until reddit was popular. HN was in fact created because reddit go so popular it no longer appealed to PG, so he started HN so he could moderate the conversation himself and steer the community they way he wanted it to go.

The other thing you said partly true -- in the beginning the founders had about 100 accounts that they posted with, but there were no comments back then. There was never fake commenting, and the posts weren't "fake" either. Alexis would scour the internet all day looking for interesting things and then posting them with random accounts, as would Steve.

So if anything Alexis and Steve were just really prolific users.

But the site was self sustaining by the time comments launched. ie. There would be fresh content even if Steve and Alexis didn't post anything that day.

Thats some mighty handwavy mental gymnastics to not call them liars.

Pretending to be different people to post qualifies as 'fake posts'.

Fake it till you make it, or fraud?

Either way it's still bullshit.

As a long time redditor I wonder too about some of this. I wrote it off a long time ago as probably part of their attempts to drive eyeballs to the site, any eyeballs so that they could demonstrate growth in a market dominated at the time by Digg and Fark.

They always made a point of claiming that speech was free, no subjects were off limits, anything goes. That allowed posters like violentacrez to post his shit and get his 15 minutes of fame before they had to admit that some stuff was better left unsaid. Some of the most notorious stories date back to the days before there were subject and subreddit bans. Once they achieved their engagement goals they were more amenable to ban things that were widely considered unsavory.

I don't understand why Aaron's part is sidelined now as it appears to be crumbsnatching by Steve and Alexis when they grab all the credit. He appeared at the time to be on equal footing with them in the process of managing the site.

MaxwellHill managed to position themselves as a knowledgeable source of information. This was something that reddit needed and set her up to be a prominent mod.

YC is silent about things because they had skin in the game and feared a rash.