Deceptive Patterns
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How Reddit’s cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts

Author
Kevin Moris
Date
19 Jul 2012
Category
Journalist or Media

“You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there’d be tons of … fake users,” Huffman says […] “Social websites require a little bit of magic to work”

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.