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Comment by overthemoon | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting. You said your brother helped out by posting comments to make it seem more active, do you think that was an important part of its success? I always wonder how sites like this get over the initial evil cycle of no users => no one wants to use it => no users etc.

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Fake them.

"In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username."

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

A long time ago, the main three sites I visited daily were Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Reddit only had (I believe) a few thousand users at the time and /hot was mostly populated in roughly equal parts with links to content about obscure programming languages/techniques, news articles, and links to content about illicit drugs/weed. I was only semi-interested in the first and not at all in the last two, so I dropped it from my rotation thinking, "man, this is never going to take off."

This is interesting. Three websites, at the time pretty much interchangeable, yet one flourished and other two died. Predicting which one would win would've been impossible. VCs invest in all three and hope for the best.

It is ironic that they created a bunch of fake users to fake activity, but would now ban anyone else that did the same.

I believe Elizabeth Holmes early on remarked "Fake it till you make it."

I don’t think it’s ironic. Both policies are in the interest of Reddit.

Is this legal or do you have to state somewhere that the content is fake?

If it is, it'll be interesting to see how the law will develop (across the globe) regarding fake/generated content in the time of GPTs and such.

The content here isn’t fake, so I don’t think this strongly resembles generative AI. As far as I know it’s also legal to astroturf in this way because there’s no claim that every poster is a real user. Even today there are Reddit bots although by convention they make themselves obvious.

IANAL but if one were to claim in public that the fake users were real (and there were actual damages) then that may well be actionable in a court of law.

I don't think this (comments by someone for commercial reasons not being indicated as such) is legal in the UK, I can't cite the legislation on it. Pretty sure it was in the raft of business requirements that the EU bundled, one of which was business being required to provide a trading address.

Perhaps part of the eCommerce directive?

Even if you did claim every user was real, how would that be illegal? Defrauding investors is illegal. But fake users isn’t necessarily defrauding investors.

Ah, okay that makes sense. Thanks for the detailed response!

It isn't fake, it is just created by another user.

I personally have multiple accounts on multiple sites.

None of them are fake, all are well behaved I think, but there are some things that are best said with an account linked to my name and some things that are not a problem to discuss pseudonymously that could create major hassle for someone if it was connected to a name.

What's curious is that it's seen as a standard method of gaining traction for your website but Reddit, at least, now "strongly discourages" using alts in this manner.

> It isn't fake, it is just created by another user.

It's not "just created by another user," it's created by the owners under multiple false names meant to give the impression that it's multiple people (sock-puppeting) and that those people are not the owners (literal shilling.)

It's an obvious fraud, but the law is probably far behind. Who would sue unless there were some financial risk involved, and without financial risk who would even have standing to sue?

What would even be the basis for a lawsuit? It's just content on a forum site.

If you squinted real hard you'd claim that your time was wasted, and then value your time as a function of revenue earned from your views, and set up a class action suit for everyone who had ever viewed that site and been thusly defrauded.

.......and promptly win about $1.98 in the process.

People are assuming it’s a part of financial fraud. Which it obviously isn’t.

It’s akin to putting a fake pic on a dating website as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, the content isn't fake though...?

Using multiple usernames on your own website is definitely legal.

> Using multiple usernames on your own website is definitely legal.

I'm sure you can't say this. If I open an ecommerce site and fill it with fake reviews, I'm pretty sure I could end up in legal trouble.

A better analogy here would be "fill it with real reviews, but use multiple usernames."

I imagine to some degree it helped, I mean no one wants to be a part of an empty community right?

Keeping "fresh" torrents on the front page probably mattered more, at least it would have to me as a user.

This would actually be a great (albeit ethically dubious growth hack) way to leverage LLMs…wire up a script that can create some amount of user accounts, then have them talk to each other in comments or forum threads that are started around various seed keywords.

I have little doubt that this has been happening widely since like, at least 2016.

They'll be getting better at it and harder to spot now though.

With a sophisticated “good bye” post when the bot service is scaled down after organic growth.

Maybe this is why my website's page views have gone from around 500/day to 1,000 in the past month.

I agree this has probably already been happening, but it would be an interesting project nonetheless.

It would also be interesting to make a forum that’s completely upfront about it. Just make it a feature. Make them post on a realistic schedule to keep the forums idling. Ultimately not that useful but it would be interesting to play with.

Or make it a game. Make some persona for someone that is an expert in something and a prick. The game is to argue with them and convince enough of the other accounts that you’re right.

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