#228 2005 · Reddit · Social media
Reddit's founders faked a crowd until a real one moved in
the problem
A community site with no community
background
A link-sharing and discussion site is worthless empty: no posts means no reason to visit, and no visitors means no one posts. Reddit launched in 2005 with exactly that problem and no existing audience to seed it from, the same wall every social platform hits before the first real community forms.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian didn't wait. They built themselves a hidden field on the submission form that let them post and comment under any username they typed, registering it on the spot, and switch between invented personas with a click — arguing with themselves under different names to make the site look like an active community from day one.
the move
The founders posted under a swarm of fake usernames so the site looked inhabited from day one.
the payoff
Openly admitted years later; seeded the tone and culture the real community then adopted.
what came after
Huffman disclosed the practice publicly in 2012, in a video for the online education platform Udacity, explaining that puppeting the accounts themselves let the founders set the tone and community standards early — standards that held once genuine users arrived in numbers and the fake accounts were retired. The story has since become a reference point in startup circles for bootstrapping a two-sided platform by faking one side of it convincingly enough that the other side commits.
filed under
references
- [1]How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake AccountsVice, 2012vice.com
- [2]Reddit Cofounder Says Site Was Built By a Horde of Fake AccountsSlashdot, 2012news.slashdot.org