Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
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Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#2They are doing the same now.... Reddit will end the same way as it begun
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#3They 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.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#4> Huffman explains the strategy in a video for Udacity, an online education service.
The Udacity web development course was my introduction to coding. It blew my mind. He was a good teacher.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#5Their eventual replacement will have to employ similar shenanigans, right? It's basically tradition among social media unicorns.
Except now, of course, one can build MUCH more interesting tools for pre-seeding communities. Should be fun!
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#6Many small startups generate fake traffic, either for testing or for marketing purposes (e.g. cheating on the numbers).
I would be surprised to find any successful company that had no shenanigans in their origin story.
My history included a startup that shipped empty boxes to meet numbers, scraped thousands of emails from more popular websites to sell as their own traffic, even one that forged stock certificates to secure funding. (The FBI ended that one)
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#7I'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.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#8I'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.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#9So does every social network.
Re: Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular (2012)
#10Price Club #1 on Morena Blvd., San Diego, asked employees, friends, and family to park cars in the lot. Seems to work. Of course the financials weren't reporting average daily cars in the lot either.