I have a social travel product (http://wherescool.com) that I launched in 2009 with a team composed of 65+ "writer interns" I found off of the NYC Craigslist jobs section. We filled up the site with so much quality content it was written up by the NY Times within a few weeks.

Pretty sure I was inspired by Reddit at the time, and also Yelp which actually was mostly seeded by paid writers in the early days.

There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to dabble in...