They spent their time populating the site by hand because ultimately they knew that's how their users would do it.
The accounts they used weren't fake, they were just the two guys building a site with a lot of test accounts.
The accounts they used weren't fake, they were just the two guys building a site with a lot of test accounts.
Uh, yeah, they were. They intentionally created _false_ accounts of people with different names to give the impression that a lot of people were already submitting content to the site.
The accounts were real enough. They were people (Steve and Alexis) posting interesting stories to their own site. They just happened to give the illusion of lots of people doing it...which is kinda mandatory for a new site, if you want to kickstart it.
I enjoyed the really high quality links they posted; that was the only "contract" I felt like I had with reddit at that point. There was no discussion in the beginning, so the links were all there was, and they were high quality (i.e. I enjoyed reading the linked stories). Faking a community would be much harder, so it's lucky they didn't have to. By the time comments were a part of the experience at reddit, there were enough actual users to make it happen.