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Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that this behaviour seems to be tolerated. Yes, it works, but so do a lot of other slimy subterfuges and shady business practices. I'm steadfastly of the opinion that if you can't be honest about how you are doing it, it shouldn't be done, and shouldn't be condoned. I do not believe that ends justify means. Lies and deceit make for a lousy foundation.

Would the site really have been worse off if the same posts had been submitted under the founders' real names? Instead of starting out with false pretenses, could they have encouraged their friends to contribute? I think once one goes down this path, the success of the whole endeavor is tainted. Yes, crime frequently pays and cheaters often win, but that's something that we as a community should work to change.

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Kevin Rose first mentioned Digg as being a site that belonged to one of his friend's instead of saying "Check out my new site Digg!" Both Reddit & Digg would have been worse off if the founders didn't do what they did.

These are social sites and subject to the same kind of first impression biases that we all face in person.

Imagine showing up at a party with 2 guys sitting on a couch talking to each other compared to a party with people out front talking, people inside dancing and a small group in the back yard sharing a laugh. Social proof matters & I'd hardly consider this cheating or slimy.

But it is. People will look at a site like HN, say, "Ah, there are lots of really smart people on here: this guy has done this, that guy has done that, etc.", only to find out it's really just pg arguing with himself. It's deceptive because people believe they are getting 500 independent evaluations when really they're getting 5 original responses times 100 falsifications of what those five people think someone else might say. It's not a fair way to represent the site to its readership or participants.

If you say, "Ah, my party will probably only be three of us, I better pay 100 people to stand around so that I don't look bad", do people normally think this is an honest practice? You're still perpetrating a deception that could have real consequences.

find out it's really just pg arguing with himself

Sounds fascinating to me

For me, the distinction is that the site was just starting out. Personally, I feel they're entitled to some leeway to get the conversation/momentum going. If this was happening 2 years down the road then I'd agree it's a problem.

If it were a dating site and the founders filled it with a bunch of fake profiles with pictures of models, then I would have an issue with it because I'd feel the user is being taken advantage of. If there's a fake profile submitting links to news stories, there isn't much of a victim.

As they say "in business there is no morality"

ADD: sure it's unpleasant, so let's just downvote and stay happy.

That's simply not true.

I tend to think it's true. With the exception of when business means something bigger, ie when it actually has been defined by moral principles, like wikipedia, which more of a charity than business anyway.

It's not a prerequisite. There are people that can businesses ruthlessly and without moral regard for the choices they make. I think more often the morality of most businesses is misrepresented as absent for the convenience of those who want to evoke sympathy within the proletariat.

"Heavy weighs the head that wears the crown"; when you lead a large entity, there are always going to be people that are unhappy with your choices. I think by and large the great majority of businesspersons attempt to conduct business morally in general.

>Would the site really have been worse off if the same posts had been submitted under the founders' real names?

I can only speculate, but a site ostensibly where "all readers are editors" full of posts from only "kn0thing" and "spez" doesn't make for the best first impression of a community. Something to also remember is that in 2005, it was MUCH harder for buzz to spread online; I saw this firsthand launching hipmunk in 2010 and what a difference just 5 yrs made in producing all those 'social media' websites.

>Instead of starting out with false pretenses, could they have encouraged their friends to contribute?

Believe me, I did. Maybe 3 of them became regular submitters: Morgan, Connor, and Steve's girlfriend. Perhaps I'm not persuasive enough, but the 1% rule applies -- 1% or less of the traffic that visits a user-gen site actually creates content. So even if you had 100 friends who became regular visitors, you could only count on a few of them to become submitters.

>I think once one goes down this path, the success of the whole endeavor is tainted. Yes, crime frequently pays and cheaters often win, but that's something that we as a community should work to change.

Wow. That's quite the charge. I'm sorry you feel that way. I agree we should work to fight cheating, which is something we to this day take very seriously when it comes to trying to game reddit -- one of the reasons why reddit triumphed over digg.

I run a reddit clone (conceptually; I wrote my own codebase after struggling with reddit OSS for about a year) and I have decided not to astroturf. It is deceptive, and while the deception may not harm every participant, it can harm some of them. As the saying goes, "there is no such thing as a point of view from nowhere"; even if your fake accounts attempt to take on different arguments, they are always tainted by your experience and the value of the contribution suffers. If a person makes a decision based on the consensus among 20 contributors, but they are actually 2 contributors, I believe that an immoral deception has occurred, especially if that decision is major or important.

I suppose if all your comments were things like, "Cool story, I'm glad you posted it", there's not much of a problem, but that doesn't seem like it would really drive engagement.

I have been a member of sites that grow organically with [almost] no activity. You just have to find a group of people that don't necessarily mind a slower pace; it really only takes a relatively small base of active users to get a snowball going. I don't think resorting to astroturfing is a necessity and I do think there is a permanent taint on sites that gain success by dubious methodology like this instead of slower, truer organic growth.

We did not have a commenting system back then.

I appreciate your response, and appreciate that Reddit existed at the time it did. I'm willing to believe that this level of deception was necessary to allow that existence, and thus the net result was positive. I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou: I'm sure I've done worse, and in your position, I might have done the same. Still, I do view this as cheating, as deception.

I worry that if people "bend the rules" in cases like this, they are likely to bend other rules that will cause harm to me and others. I'm very leery to do business with anyone who appears to boast of prior deceptions, as I have to presume they will attempt to deceive me in the future. I probably shouldn't have used the word "crime", but as with attracting subscribers with false profiles on a dating site, I'm not certain that it shouldn't be one.

I don't mean to single you out in particular. Talking about what's necessary to get a site like that going is better than everyone doing it in silence. I guess my real worry is that it's all a downward spiral, with ever more egregious tactics necessary to make a site stand out from the crowd. Maybe it's just a convenient excuse for my personal relative lack of success, but I've never been comfortable with the moral compromises that being in business seems to require.

Do you know that we didn't have comments back then?

Based on similar comments it appears most HN commenters assume we astroturfed discussions when in fact we had no commenting system; the only user generated content on reddit was only a username and submissions (there are no 'profiles' to speak of either).

I didn't know that you started without comments. They were there (and high quality) when I arrived. I'm 'nkurz' there as well, never have been an active commenter, and lurked for at least a year before signing up so as to be able to vote.

But I've been presuming we're talking about submissions rather than comments. I'd be even harsher (and more incredulous that you are defending your behaviour) if I thought you were using shill accounts to falsely attribute comments!

It's clear that we have different value systems that we use to evaluate this. It's also clear that you've thought this through and decided you are OK with it. I'll keep trying to understand how this is, but for now I'm still baffled.

IMHO, this attitude is equivalent the guys who lie to pick up girls. It affects everyone indirectly and justifies a bunch of douchebags to do the same (specially here on HN). And now some of us a a bit more cynical after discovering this. I don't understand how you are proud of it. It's very disappointing.

crime frequently pays and cheaters often win

That is a severe judgement. I see it more as a clever hack. Building a community site or a marketplace is the age old chicken and egg problem. Without an existing community, you cant get users. And without users you cant build a community.

That's an extremely naive attitude. It's next to impossible (won't say completely) to start an online community without seeding it first. Forums in particular - you cannot get a forum going without seeding it with made up posts and comments, it simply won't happen. Nobody will comment on an empty forum or discussion board - nobody.

This is entirely wrong. From personal experience, I've seen one of our forums for a utility app, grow a nice little community with not so much as a single false post. Users started appearing by themselves after having tried out the app, and we ended up with a decent, albeit small community on the forum. There's plenty of other forums as well, that grows from a small group of real users. Hell, every subreddit starts like that, except apparently for the first ones populated only by the reddit founders.

I think a forum for an app is a bit different because it has a specific topic that makes people seek it out. No one is going to stay on a new discussion forum if it has no users and there are more options. Also, subreddits may start out like that, but have you seen how many are completely deserted?

You can seed a community without engaging in deceptive practices. At least you could, it may be harder now that some people are doing it. As usual...

I founded the largest discussion forum in Africa. I seeded it by posting good topics, responding to every topic posted by a newbie, and begging my friends to get active on the site. I believe deceptive practices are not required.

That's not what I read...

http://www.seunosewa.com/2012/03/social-network-chicken-and-...

That post seems to corroborate what the grandparent says, not contradict it as you claim/imply.

It's hard, but doable.

I have never figured out how to build a community from scratch. But I have belonged to several communities over the years which were built from scratch, without "seeding" it. I also have a track record of tremendously increasing traffic and membership for established sites. Since I have done that, both as a moderator and as a member, I suspect that statements like yours fall in the category of "I do not know how, therefore I think no one knows how and I also think it cannot be figured out by anyone." Maybe you can't figure it out. But since forums do exist which were developed from scratch, I don't think that means no one can figure it out.

Reddit doesn't lock people into 1 account. They're free to register multiple times.

It's common practice to use throwaway accounts when writing personally.

Any successful social media or community site has some bodies buried somewhere. The problem of getting a nucleus of 10,000 people or so engaged in some activity requires you to do something pretty aggressive to get their attention.

I see nothing wrong with it.

As someone just starting out, you need to bend the rules once-in-awhile to succeed.

The problem with any forum is the chicken and the egg problem. You won't get people posting/coming back unless it seems like there are lots of people posting (the forum isn't dead).

You either need to fake the content yourself or pay people to do it for you. Most forums do this. There are many other types of sites that most likely need to do this as well (dating sites, for example)

Agreed. It is one thing to falsify customer reviews, for example, but something completely different to have several aliases to promote an active community. The information and links that were posted obviously provided value to readers. Who posted it is not quite as important. The same thing with Kevin Rose saying that digg was a friends site. People are naturally guarded against being sold to - even if the said item acutally does provide true value. People just want to decide on their own without the sales pressure.

I don't think their lied, were dishonest or deceitful. Both founders will say in interviews that they used fake accounts, not try to hide the fact that they did.

For me there's a difference between cheating and hurting someone by doing so and cheating without hurting anybody.

Yes you could say cheating always causes damage in some shape or form and you would probably be right, but I'm not a good enough person myself to judge anyone on a such nuances of morality.

Of all not quite morally flawless sales practices this one is on the harmless end of the scale in my view.

> I'm surprised that this behaviour seems to be tolerated. Yes, it works, but so do a lot of other slimy subterfuges and shady business practices

I think this is not a fair comparison. Shady businesses try to rip you off and somehow give you less for your money - while they tried to set the tone and really submit legit content or as he put it "high quality content". So while the traffic in general was staged at least the content was in fact real and you had the real benefits of reddit.

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