[socko]

Originally Posted by Walken After Midnight

It would probably be possible to hire someone for a dollar a day, from some developing nation, and then get them to make several hundred posts to the site daily, in order to keep things looking busy.

When Reddit was starting up, the owners actually did use socks and create a lot of content, to make it seem busy. The amusing part is I read about this on Reddit.

Here’s an interesting revelation from Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman: The social news site was built on a lie. Many hundreds of lies, to be more specific, in the form of fake user accounts that Huffman and fellow cofounder Alexis Ohanian used to populate the site in its earliest days.

“You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there’d be tons of … fake users,” Huffman says in a video for online educator Udacity.

Through those fake accounts, Huffman and Ohanian submitted high-quality content—the type of articles they wanted read. This “set the tone” for the site as whole, Huffman said and, at the same time, made it look populated.