[overthemoon]

This is really interesting. You said your brother helped out by posting comments to make it seem more active, do you think that was an important part of its success? I always wonder how sites like this get over the initial evil cycle of no users => no one wants to use it => no users etc.

[markx2]

Fake them.

"In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

[bityard]

A long time ago, the main three sites I visited daily were Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Reddit only had (I believe) a few thousand users at the time and /hot was mostly populated in roughly equal parts with links to content about obscure programming languages/techniques, news articles, and links to content about illicit drugs/weed. I was only semi-interested in the first and not at all in the last two, so I dropped it from my rotation thinking, "man, this is never going to take off."

[grumple]

It is ironic that they created a bunch of fake users to fake activity, but would now ban anyone else that did the same.

[egeozcan]

Is this legal or do you have to state somewhere that the content is fake?

If it is, it'll be interesting to see how the law will develop (across the globe) regarding fake/generated content in the time of GPTs and such.

[en3r0]

I imagine to some degree it helped, I mean no one wants to be a part of an empty community right?

Keeping "fresh" torrents on the front page probably mattered more, at least it would have to me as a user.

[dchuk]

This would actually be a great (albeit ethically dubious growth hack) way to leverage LLMs…wire up a script that can create some amount of user accounts, then have them talk to each other in comments or forum threads that are started around various seed keywords.

[mandmandam]

I have little doubt that this has been happening widely since like, at least 2016.

They'll be getting better at it and harder to spot now though.

[nonethewiser]

I agree this has probably already been happening, but it would be an interesting project nonetheless.

It would also be interesting to make a forum that’s completely upfront about it. Just make it a feature. Make them post on a realistic schedule to keep the forums idling. Ultimately not that useful but it would be interesting to play with.

Or make it a game. Make some persona for someone that is an expert in something and a prick. The game is to argue with them and convince enough of the other accounts that you’re right.