How would this be unethical in reddit's case? It's not like they tried to raise money (from investors or users) using the faked activity.

Deceiving early days users. Since when lying is OK?

What did they lie about? People on Reddit and right here on HN use multiple accounts all the time (look at all the throwaway accounts).

throwaway is very explicit, there's no lie involved since everyone knows what it means.

> What did they lie about?

Fake users being piloted by the same person behind the screen. If that's not a lie, then I don't know what is.

geez, if that's your biggest complaint about discussion forums, you live a pretty blessed life.

We're talking about Internet discussion forums here.. The amount of fakery, lying, bullshit and outright awfulness that happens on forums every single day across the whole Internet is staggering.

If they used aliases to kickstart discussions and try to get people involved and contributing, I'm not sure that's something to get your pitchfork out about.

Ethics? Where we're going, we don't _need_ ethics. [ flips down silver goggles ]

The founder also made the jailbait subreddit and it won sub of the year in 2011?

they also removed third party apis and mod tools before an ipo. If one had bad thoughts they would think increasing their own app numbers and reducing tools to remove bot activity would be unethical ways to bolsters user counts before a sale. But that would not happen

Please stick to facts when criticizing people.

This subreddit was created by an unpaid moderator, not a co-founder of Reddit.

Subreddit of the year is also a user poll, so that doesn’t necessarily imply endorsement by company leadership.

You also got the year wrong, it won in 2008. It was shut down in 2011.

Reddit does deserve a lot of criticism for knowingly keeping the sub and other sketchy ones around, supposedly in the name of “free speech.” But your statement is not accurate.

Whether this policy was naivety or more of a quiet but direct endorsement is up for debate. Obviously, Reddit had ample opportunity to take down this and other deplorable subreddits. They were not ignorant of their existence. At best they slow-walked the process, at worst their tolerance implied endorsement.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

https://www.gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacre...

The internet generally believes that /u/violentacrez created /r/jailbait . That user's "irl" identity is known, and he is not a founder of reddit. See https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/1hzra9/doxg...

I looked into it, back when anyone could be made mod there was an inside joke on reddit of making Obama and Snopp dogg mods of things. Someone made spez a mod of jailbait and took a screenshot that was reposted around the internet and I forgot about the third party modding thing.

However he defended the place publically, and gave an award called Pimp Daddy to violentacrez, which shows some level of consideration and recognition by the now CEO of reddit.

looking at it with the hindsight of time, the "free speech" defense rings a bit hollow considering the communities they were protecting at the time