Interesting... I lean more to the latter, I am usually happy to seed, as you put it, other startups I find useful, but not necessarily meeting my needs.

I think posting your startup on news.yc allows it to be given a closer look since the community here is much tighter than most sites. I'm much more willing to graze past the usual .5 second judgment of any site posted here.

In terms of seeding for my site, if let's say 100 people added just one resource and just one sticky for that resource, then I think the site would look much better.

This is something that can be done in less than 15 minutes.

There are many services for this. Forums such as digital point or software auction sites like rentacoder work well. Even paying outright for your users is very common. Numerous large social sites with money have used affiliate systems such as commission junction, usually offering from .75$ to 2$ per user. Finally, youtube, myspace, every big social site has done contests that award people who refer the most new users.

I find the ways of getting users without paying for them directly to be more interesting though.

It is so difficult to get the right users to pay for your services when the most people using the Internet believe in getting things for free.

The problems of most startups (and VCs who back them) is their lack of discipline to map out a tangible goal and direction.

How can people develop a product when they do not know the market? Developing a product that is looking for a marketplace is a challenging way to generate revenue.

Here's something of that nature I came across some time ago: http://forumshock.com. No clue if something like that is even effective.

Many times, it's hard to show the value of your site without a populous user base. It'd be wise to look for a very specific, good use case that will help spread your service -- or you might get lucky with something like YouTube's "One Lazy Sunday" of your own.

news.ycombinator.com already does this, passively.