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.
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.