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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

OTTOMH:

reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it. facebook: Zuck acquired the main harvard email list and spammed everyone. myspace: The parent company spammed all its users. digg: ?

I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.

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IIRC, Kevin Rose promoted digg during his TechTV gig.

I think Facebook started as a hot-or-not clone. Zuck went around to the college residences to scrape the pictures from the residence's face books.

For posterity - digg on TechTv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4

From what I remember, Digg first became popular when Paris Hilton's phone got hacked. They were one of the first sites to break the news with the leaked phone numbers.

So she will actually go down in history for some noteworthy event :-)

I predict here today that Paris Hilton's fame will outlast Digg by many, many years.

True. We were chugging along, growing about 20% a month, 4 months in, when that story appeared on digg and then got indexed by yahoo (we were no.1 and no.3 for the search "paris hilton phone"). Traffic doubled instantly. That should underline the importance of SEO. Get your friends to link to your site.

Yeah, I tried to do some reading about plentyoffish and couldn't find anything about myspace spamming. Though I don't doubt he had a ton of fake accounts at the start, and probably did some deal of spam.

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