I dunno about bots, but almost every social website I know is bootstrapped by having the founders comment back and forth with each other. There was an interview with Reddit where they said their first 2 months basically consisted of the two of them submitting every link they could find to their own site.

When I was at inAsphere.com, the first thing we did after launch was "Okay, I want every staff member to create at least 5 fake personas, and have conversations with yourselves." So we created accounts and came up with backgrounds and personalities and stuff, and had mock arguments with ourselves on the forums.

I know cross-x.com started the same way, since it was by the same founder.

The only website I've been involved with which didn't seed things with a bunch of fake usernames was FictionAlley. That was largely because the site was intended to be personal, for a few friends only, and only randomly happened to catch on among the general fandom. Since it was started with more than a dozen founders, they had ample material to begin with.

True. I can relate to that. I personally have launched quite a few sites but if I can't get initial traction, I usually go back to the drawing board and figure out why or fold them - so clearly I have a bias against this business of fake personas and bots.

I was involved with a dot com back in 2001 where I did an internship. Our first week consisted of all the staff members(there were about 10 of them) creating accounts and contributing. BUT THAT WASN'T THE SITE'S MAIN MARKETING PLAN. That is what you have to understand. Bots and fake personas have very limited lifetime; at the end you have to get real users to make your site of some worth.

Of course; a site that's just the staff commenting back and forth to each other is really a circlejerk, not a webapp. That's what killed inAsphere: it really wasn't all that interesting. Even after getting all sorts of publicity, we weren't retaining visitors. And our existing userbase (we folded cross-x.com into it) was leaving not bringing their friends in.

But there's a difference between a site that sucks no matter what you do and a site that could survive on its own if only it passed the initial attracting-users hurdle. Reddit's a good example of the latter: I checked it out about a week after it launched, and it was really quite boring. I came back a few months later, and it actually had a thriving community. If the Reddit founders hadn't stuck with it and just folded the site, they'd be out a few million dollars.