I run a reddit clone (conceptually; I wrote my own codebase after struggling with reddit OSS for about a year) and I have decided not to astroturf. It is deceptive, and while the deception may not harm every participant, it can harm some of them. As the saying goes, "there is no such thing as a point of view from nowhere"; even if your fake accounts attempt to take on different arguments, they are always tainted by your experience and the value of the contribution suffers. If a person makes a decision based on the consensus among 20 contributors, but they are actually 2 contributors, I believe that an immoral deception has occurred, especially if that decision is major or important.

I suppose if all your comments were things like, "Cool story, I'm glad you posted it", there's not much of a problem, but that doesn't seem like it would really drive engagement.

I have been a member of sites that grow organically with [almost] no activity. You just have to find a group of people that don't necessarily mind a slower pace; it really only takes a relatively small base of active users to get a snowball going. I don't think resorting to astroturfing is a necessity and I do think there is a permanent taint on sites that gain success by dubious methodology like this instead of slower, truer organic growth.

We did not have a commenting system back then.

I appreciate your response, and appreciate that Reddit existed at the time it did. I'm willing to believe that this level of deception was necessary to allow that existence, and thus the net result was positive. I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou: I'm sure I've done worse, and in your position, I might have done the same. Still, I do view this as cheating, as deception.

I worry that if people "bend the rules" in cases like this, they are likely to bend other rules that will cause harm to me and others. I'm very leery to do business with anyone who appears to boast of prior deceptions, as I have to presume they will attempt to deceive me in the future. I probably shouldn't have used the word "crime", but as with attracting subscribers with false profiles on a dating site, I'm not certain that it shouldn't be one.

I don't mean to single you out in particular. Talking about what's necessary to get a site like that going is better than everyone doing it in silence. I guess my real worry is that it's all a downward spiral, with ever more egregious tactics necessary to make a site stand out from the crowd. Maybe it's just a convenient excuse for my personal relative lack of success, but I've never been comfortable with the moral compromises that being in business seems to require.

Do you know that we didn't have comments back then?

Based on similar comments it appears most HN commenters assume we astroturfed discussions when in fact we had no commenting system; the only user generated content on reddit was only a username and submissions (there are no 'profiles' to speak of either).

I didn't know that you started without comments. They were there (and high quality) when I arrived. I'm 'nkurz' there as well, never have been an active commenter, and lurked for at least a year before signing up so as to be able to vote.

But I've been presuming we're talking about submissions rather than comments. I'd be even harsher (and more incredulous that you are defending your behaviour) if I thought you were using shill accounts to falsely attribute comments!

It's clear that we have different value systems that we use to evaluate this. It's also clear that you've thought this through and decided you are OK with it. I'll keep trying to understand how this is, but for now I'm still baffled.

IMHO, this attitude is equivalent the guys who lie to pick up girls. It affects everyone indirectly and justifies a bunch of douchebags to do the same (specially here on HN). And now some of us a a bit more cynical after discovering this. I don't understand how you are proud of it. It's very disappointing.