I dunno, as someone generally disillusioned by tech and its shady practices/ethics, this doesn't seem all that bad to me. It's a little gross but maybe a necessary evil in this day and age.
Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#22I've been considering using Reddit data to pre-seed the content in a successor to Reddit. Though I am unsure how that would stand legally. As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
I was chatting about this with some friends. If we had a million or so spare, just fork Reddit. Grab the latest open source version of Reddit, pay the pushshift guys for the most up-to-date dump they have and get it in. Make a system for claiming your old Reddit account. I'm guessing if you try to use OAuth, Reddit will just ban you. So you need to get creative, probably make an extension that grabs the users session…
Noone will use it
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#23[flagged]
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#24I've been considering using Reddit data to pre-seed the content in a successor to Reddit. Though I am unsure how that would stand legally. As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
Just launder it through an LLM, problem solved.
don’t even need reddit with an llm, I did some back of the napkin token math and you can fake a year of activity for a couple thousand dollars (varies by number of users and comment length of course) - hell, you can even make it look active in real-time and respond to real users - as long as you give it some guidance about commenting style (as in not the default gpt 8th grade essay style) it’s very hard to tell
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#25I've been considering using Reddit data to pre-seed the content in a successor to Reddit. Though I am unsure how that would stand legally. As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
IANAL. For the US, users grant Reddit a license to use their content when they post it. The users still own that content. Reddit's license does not extend to your reuse of it[0], nor have the underlying users directly granted you permission, so it would not be legal (in the US) for you to reuse like that. [0] "you may not... license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Serv…
Although prompting “write a comment replying to the text ‘ in the style of u/landfe“ would yield something I copyrightable…
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#26They are doing the same now.... Reddit will end the same way as it begun
They don't need to; the incentives are aligned, just as they were for Twitter when it was a public company. Banning reasonably well-behaved spammers (the competent ones) would only serve to lower the IPO price.
I wasnt talking about spammers... I'm talking about content created by Reddit itself.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#27I've been considering using Reddit data to pre-seed the content in a successor to Reddit. Though I am unsure how that would stand legally. As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
> As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account.
"I broke Reddit's TOS deliberately and repeatedly and they banned me!" is another way to put it. But it doesn't sound as good and because of the current zeitgeist people will tend to side with you anyway. Perfect timing for you :)
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#28I've been considering using Reddit data to pre-seed the content in a successor to Reddit. Though I am unsure how that would stand legally. As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
IANAL. For the US, users grant Reddit a license to use their content when they post it. The users still own that content. Reddit's license does not extend to your reuse of it[0], nor have the underlying users directly granted you permission, so it would not be legal (in the US) for you to reuse like that. [0] "you may not... license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Serv…
Wouldn't that mean it would be down to the individual users who still own each bit of content to issue a DMCA takedown if they objected?
I imagine the number of such requests would be small.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#29Well, dating sites and other sites that needed to bootstrap to critical mass used to do it all the time. YouTube filled their site with copyrighted clips.
With AI, it would be far easier to bootstrap a plausible-looking site full of “active users”, and unscrupulous startups might do that.
It is why we built this, which at least is the most ethical approach we could come up with, as a service for any community to encourage discussion on ghost-town topics, while clearly disclosing its bots:
In about the broader debate about generative AI, this seems to be one of the least harmful (it has responsible disclosures) and most helpful (https://xkcd.com/810/) approaches
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35779455
PS: feel free to use it if you own a Discourse forum, we would love to hear feedback
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#30It's a solid technique. I did the exact same thing for a news site I started with comments on articles and the forum.
No one wants to hang around a 'dead' site, but post enough activity, post enough 'controversial' comments and people will want to join in, and then suddenly you have an actual ecosystem of real people driving traffic.