Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests

Re:Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread ... by pixl97 on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @08:53AM (#36211883)

Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins not do it now if it worked then.

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Re:Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread ... by shrikant on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @09:30AM (#36212428)

I guess you just needed the right search terms? I searched for "history of reddit fake user activity" and got this:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well:

> Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.

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Re:Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread ... by jstarfish on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @11:27AM (#36214335)

"Hundreds" of fake users doesn't register in the grand scale of things.

Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip jar with a few dollars.

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Re:Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread ... by pixl97 on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @11:47AM (#36214652)

I guess at the end of the day scale matters. When Reddit was doing this that percentage of fake posts was huge per capita of total users.

Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when committing said fraud would bring said investigation because it increased the value of its investment.

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Re:Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread ... by CaptainNegative on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @09:26AM (#36212353)

Reddit Founders Made Hundreds of Fake Profiles So Site Looked Popular https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

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