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.