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Comment by greenail | Hacker News Reader

I think they missed "create fake users" which is less likely to be admitted but likely a viable strategy. Are there any good studies on how fake users influence your ability to acquire new users?

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Anecdata, but when starting a web forum years and years ago, I had to post regularly as a dozen sock puppet users to kick start it. Nobody wants to be the first, and 99 percent of people just lurk.

I’ve been a soundsystem mc and organizing parties since 97. I have noticed similar behavior on the patrons attending. People either need to get tipsy enough or someone else has to have the courage and be the first one dancing. Now, even if it’s not my show, I tend to be early on dancing and that usually opens up “queue”.. ratio of lurkers is ofcourse high but the genre is more geared towards people coming to actually dance.

Ah yes the classic Dancing Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

This would have been gold if it was narrated by Steve Irwin/Crocodile Hunter. I felt like I was watching a nature documentary.

This is so incredible! Not sure if real or not but it seems plausible as to how movements are created. Very illuminating if true. Hope to apply it in future ventures.

I was expecting cops to arrest him for being stoned.

Also, YT recommended this video: https://youtu.be/SA7bKo4HRTg

It might be the best 5 minutes of your day

In case anyone else wants to know about it before investing their time:

The YouTube video title is "Funniest Leadership Speech ever!"

It's a little humerous, but I didn't hear anything about leadership - the word was never even said by the speaker! The speaker ended by saying "…and that's where I learned where I'm from." So yeah... not about leadership at all. Decent speech, but bad YouTube title. There wasn't any lessons or anything, just a story about the guy when he was a kid.

> the word was never even said by the speaker

the first sentence of his speech starts off with "when you think of leadership" lol

Oops. I guess that's how uninspiring the speech was. Thank you for the correction.

For people who want to avoid YouTube, the transcript is https://sive.rs/ff and the video is https://sive.rs/file/DancingGuy-ff.m4v.

Reddit did this in the early days

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

Where would dating sites be without bots?

Not just that, there was one dating site that I joined after a friend of mine recommended it to me, and I soon realized that said site was “recycling” direct messages. What I mean is, they took real messages that their users had sent to other people on the site and they sent these messages to new users. In this way they roped people into paying for premium so that you can respond to messages. And canceling the membership was really difficult too. And when I went to their terms and conditions I saw that they had sneakily put in the ToC, that no one reads, that the site was “for entertainment” and some additional wording, in order to be able to defend what they were doing. At the end of the day it’s basically fraud IMO, and super scummy behavior even if they are able to get away with it legally.

Yea, it really frustrates me that some companies can create bot accounts and basically lie to their customers and trick them into paying and it doesn't seem to be fraudulent in a legal sense. But maybe it is. Maybe there's a legal case for fraud against some of these dating sites/apps. Anyone know?

> recycling direct messages

That's kind of a genius way. Fraud for sure though.

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