Growing Reddit - Web Development

Udacity · 90.7K views · 2012-05-27 · 4:11

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Overview

A short clip from Udacity's Web Development course in which Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman describes how Reddit grew early on. He explains seeding the site with content from fake accounts.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as a first-hand admission from a founder of how Reddit seeded content with fake users, in threads on bootstrapping user-generated sites.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2012–2023

Topics

Startups & entrepreneurship Product, marketing & sales

What people said

mohsinr · 2017-11 · Recommendation
In this video Steve, co founder of Reddit, mentions some tips, steps they did, like own account creation and submitting links on the fly... [VIDEO]
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epsylon · 2014-06 · Recommendation
Steve Huffman talks about this in his Udacity course on web development: [VIDEO] (The whole unit 7 talks a lot about how they built Reddit.)
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kmeisthax · 2023-11 · Reference
While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers. How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock. [0] [VIDEO] via [LINK] [1] [LINK]
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Sources

Video by Udacity, played through YouTube.

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