The other thing you said partly true -- in the beginning the founders had about 100 accounts that they posted with, but there were no comments back then. There was never fake commenting, and the posts weren't "fake" either. Alexis would scour the internet all day looking for interesting things and then posting them with random accounts, as would Steve.
So if anything Alexis and Steve were just really prolific users.
But the site was self sustaining by the time comments launched. ie. There would be fresh content even if Steve and Alexis didn't post anything that day.
Pretending to be different people to post qualifies as 'fake posts'.
Fake it till you make it, or fraud?
Either way it's still bullshit.
Don't make me go through the effort to dig them up.
As for the order of events, I wasn't clear. I meant they talked about it on HackerNews but not contemporaneously.
If Digg hadn't made the v2.0 mistake; Reddit wouldn't be where it was now.
The accounts may of not been "fake", but reddit had many plants; it was even boasted by the administration team prior Conde Nest. Now it's more blatant than before.
I left after sub-reddits started and it went to shit as a result. It has been downhill since then (at least for what I want). HN is much more like what the original Reddit was like. I can imagine that if HN gets "sub" things it will also self-deatruct like Reddit has.
This is not quite true. StumbleUpon is where fresh content came from. It was popularized on digg.
I guess before that it was Newgrounds.
This is what I remember from the earliest days. Back and forth between their own posts using multiple accounts to give the impression of active engagement and a growing community. Reposting things from Digg, Fark, etc and grabbing memes like Rickrolls, goatse, to draw eyeballs and clicks to their single page scrolling interface.
Dodging bullshit posts was a game of waiting for comments to post so you could see which actually had real content and not some nasty meme from somewhere else.
Deciding that they needed a coat of arms and figuring out what should go on it, the alien, narwhals, etc.
You really needed an entire podcast to describe that?!
RIP Aaron, was a great guy.
Alexis and Steve are bullshit artists that got rich.
Steve was especially bad when he dipped back in.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35677196.
Step 2: ? <- could be interesting to see if they did something special here
Step 3: get Obama and other major celebrities to establish you as a media company brand.
They posted content using fake accounts to stimulate adoption.
To my recollection they allowed a lot of skeevy (illegal and/or immoral) content to proliferate.
I think they probably ran at a loss for a long time; leaning heavily on volunteer personnel.
?
Early Reddit was pretty boring unless you were interested in programming or technology. The first big bump in users from digg was during the HD-DVD key fracas. The ham-handed response by digg to even talking about the key leak pissed off a lot of users. They were already simmering due to astroturfing/Payola by "power users" (we'd call them influencers today).
Then a huge influx came after the digg v4 rollout that basically turned the site into a giant advertising channel, more so than it had been.
I'm no Reddit insider but I got turned onto it in 2005 or so and watched the digg user influxes over the years.
I think digg's fundamental problem was they viewed their user base like a passive audience. It turned out their users were in fact their main attraction. When they ruined the experience for users they left and digg was left with zero value.