Reddit used the "tell your friends" method first, and then "have PG blog about us", which really accelerated their growth, and falls under "Leverage Influencers".
This statement appears thoroughly contradictory, unless you're using an unusual definition of either appeal or attract. IMHO most people are going to see those words having almost the same meaning in the context you used them
In 2012, Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder, was honest enough to attribute Reddit's initial ability to attract new users to their fake user strategy first of all [1]. Even while they were doing that, he said, they still needed a few months to get the site self-sustaining so they could stop faking user engagement.
In that talk, Steve Huffman never even mentions influencers. Paul Graham didn't write about Reddit until 3 or 4 months in, after they had retired the fake user posting, though I agree with you influencers and friends must have been a help
Reddit launched on June 23rd, 2005, and Paul blogged about them in the first week of August. Only five weeks after launch. They were definitely still using the fake users then. In fact when I joined the company in 2007, we still had the ability to create new users on submit, we just didn't do it anymore.
Steve probably just didn't mention the PG blog post because he forgot. If you ask him, he'll gladly tell you about how PG basically forced the wide release of reddit by blogging about them despite Steve's objections.
They are referencing the sock puppet accounts the Reddit founders used to make Reddit look like less of a ghost town in the early days[1].
> Huffman reveals that, “In the beginning Alexis and I submitted all the content.” When they submitted content they created new fake user names so that it would look like the site was populated with a large user base, while, at least in the beginning, it was just the two of them submitting the content.
> Huffman explains that this did two things. For starters, it helped set the tone of the site. “Websites have this kind of inertia, and we submitted content that we would be interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit, at least for our peer group, was good, interesting stuff. We wanted a site with the most interesting content online, and so we did our best to find it and then we submitted it ourselves.”
> Creating fake users and submitting content through them also made the site feel alive. Huffman says, “Users like to feel a part of something. If they showed up to the website and the front page was blank, it just looks like a ghost town.” He says, “At the time I think we were just embarrassed to have an empty website so we submitted the content, and it worked.” After a few months they had grown their real user base to the point that they didn’t have to submit content anymore.