They spammed posts and comments with fake accounts to fake growth until it caught on and then talked about it on HackerNews ...
The other thing you said partly true -- in the beginning the founders had about 100 accounts that they posted with, but there were no comments back then. There was never fake commenting, and the posts weren't "fake" either. Alexis would scour the internet all day looking for interesting things and then posting them with random accounts, as would Steve.
So if anything Alexis and Steve were just really prolific users.
But the site was self sustaining by the time comments launched. ie. There would be fresh content even if Steve and Alexis didn't post anything that day.
Pretending to be different people to post qualifies as 'fake posts'.
Fake it till you make it, or fraud?
Either way it's still bullshit.
Don't make me go through the effort to dig them up.
As for the order of events, I wasn't clear. I meant they talked about it on HackerNews but not contemporaneously.
If Digg hadn't made the v2.0 mistake; Reddit wouldn't be where it was now.
The accounts may of not been fake, but reddit for sure had many plants; it was even boasted by the administration team prior Conde Nest. And now it's more blatant than before.
I left after sub-reddits started and it went to shit as a result. It has been downhill since then (at least for what I want). HN is much more like what the original Reddit was like. I can imagine that if HN gets "sub" things it will also self-deatruct like Reddit has.
This is not quite true. StumbleUpon is where fresh content came from. It was popularized on digg.
I guess before that it was Newgrounds.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35677196.
This is what I remember from the earliest days. Back and forth between their own posts using multiple accounts to give the impression of active engagement and a growing community. Reposting things from Digg, Fark, etc and grabbing memes like Rickrolls, goatse, to draw eyeballs and clicks to their single page scrolling interface.
Dodging bullshit posts was a game of waiting for comments to post so you could see which actually had real content and not some nasty meme from somewhere else.
Deciding that they needed a coat of arms and figuring out what should go on it, the alien, narwhals, etc.
You really needed an entire podcast to describe that?!
RIP Aaron, was a great guy.
Alexis and Steve are bullshit artists that got rich.
Steve was especially bad when he dipped back in.