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Comment by TheCapn | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who basically kickstarted his entire career by boosting posts on Reddit with bots he ran. I won't knock his talent, he's a brilliant engineer, but I 100% believe he's gotten where his is in life because he knows how to play the game properly. Heck, getting his indie business off the ground is only one of several examples he's admitted to me of using Tor networks and bots to boost his ranking in competitions or sites like reddit/twitter/etc.

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Funny you should mention Reddit, because IIRC Reddit itself started with first-party bots pretending to be users, manufacturing "social proof" to cheat around initial user acquisition hurdles.

You recalled correctly! Huffman isn't shy about it.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...

This is a very old trick; the Nazi party started their membership numbers at 500 to make it appear they had more members. A certain failed Austrian painter had membership number 555.

> Funny you should mention Reddit, because IIRC Reddit itself started with first-party bots pretending to be users, manufacturing "social proof" to cheat around initial user acquisition hurdles.

"started"?

They are still doing that today to inflate their user count...

Maybe any game where the "proper" way to play involves dishonesty and sociopathic behavior isn't one we should be structuring society around, and therefore we really shouldn't be trying to play it in the first place.

How would you check and enforce it to make sure?

Obviously some fraction of the population will lie about being honest and upright.

We don't have to do that, just make sure that dishonest behavior is not the dominant strategy. In our society, we could start by ceasing to promote and reward such behavior constantly.

> We don't have to do that,...

Why not?

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