I can't help being curious; aren't there algorithms that itentify the likelihood of a sample of text being from a given writer based differences in writing style. If so we have plenty of writing guaranteed to be from Alexis and maybe we could identify which accounts were his.

We didn't have commenting back then, so these were all link submissions. We basically stopped using these accounts after that first month or so -- once we started getting traffic.

For us, there didn't appear to be a major ethical dilemma. We used these accounts simply so that new users would see a front page of links instead of a blank website (or one with only submissions from 'kn0thing' and 'spez'). For a site like reddit, it seemed to be a key part of showing new users how the site worked. Once we got traffic (from places like YC and PG) we stopped needing these accounts and thus stopped using them.

Without writing comments it is probably Ok for me as well. Voting is still somewhat about faking other people's opinions, but there is obviously a large grey area here.

Their success speaks for itself in this case.

Ethics and success are (mostly) orthogonal.