[HN Gopher] Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so si...
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Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked
popular (2012)
Author : qzervaas
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-06-11 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| turzmo wrote:
| I dunno, as someone generally disillusioned by tech and its shady
| practices/ethics, this doesn't seem all that bad to me. It's a
| little gross but maybe a necessary evil in this day and age.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| To me, it was gross when I first learned about it, and it
| remains gross today. Just because approximately everyone[0]
| seems to be doing it, doesn't mean it's _right_.
|
| Now, I would have less of a problem with this, if all the
| founders and CEOs would openly admit, "this is how business
| works", "we do what we must", or "we don't call someone a
| business shark for being nice and friendly to the fish". But
| they don't. Instead, they go on stage or order press releases
| and creation of blog posts and other content, talking about
| changing the world for the better, about excellence, moral
| virtues, diversity, inclusion, responsibility, sustainability.
|
| It's all bullshit. Why should I believe they mean it, when they
| have a long history of lying to or bullshitting people, dating
| all the way to the first days of their companies, and they're
| 100% fine with it?
|
| --
|
| [0] - At least in the group of companies that would be
| discussed on HN and similar places.
| tiahura wrote:
| Sysops do what they want on their own BBS. News at 11.
| dom96 wrote:
| I've been considering using Reddit data to pre-seed the content
| in a successor to Reddit. Though I am unsure how that would stand
| legally.
|
| As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit
| didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit
| account.
|
| 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
| tredre3 wrote:
| > As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and
| Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old
| Reddit account.
|
| "I broke Reddit's TOS deliberately and repeatedly and they
| banned me!" is another way to put it. But it doesn't sound as
| good and because of the current zeitgeist people will tend to
| side with you anyway. Perfect timing for you :)
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Just launder it through an LLM, problem solved.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| don't even need reddit with an llm, I did some back of the
| napkin token math and you can fake a year of activity for a
| couple thousand dollars (varies by number of users and
| comment length of course) - hell, you can even make it look
| active in real-time and respond to real users - as long as
| you give it some guidance about commenting style (as in not
| the default gpt 8th grade essay style) it's very hard to tell
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Indeed. Could call it something like the RedditCrawl corpus.
| lelandfe wrote:
| IANAL. For the US, users grant Reddit a license to use their
| content when they post it. The users still own that content.
| Reddit's license does not extend to your reuse of it[0], nor
| have the underlying users directly granted you permission, so
| it would not be legal (in the US) for you to reuse like that.
|
| [0] "you may not... license, sell, transfer, assign,
| distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the
| Services or Content" https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-
| agreement-september-...
| danielheath wrote:
| Although prompting "write a comment replying to the text
| '<snip> in the style of u/landfe" would yield something I
| copyrightable...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Wouldn't that mean it would be down to the individual users
| who still own each bit of content to issue a DMCA takedown if
| they objected?
|
| I imagine the number of such requests would be small.
| scosman wrote:
| Ah. The old "I did so much copyright violation it would be
| infeasible for everyone I took content from to enforce"
| defence. I see nothing that could go wrong.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Posting that you're going to be "using Reddit data to pre-
| seed the content" may make it a bit harder to dodge Reddit
| in court.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Having first rephrased it all via Chat GPT.
|
| Load up those liabilities.
| doix wrote:
| I was chatting about this with some friends. If we had a
| million or so spare, just fork Reddit. Grab the latest open
| source version of Reddit, pay the pushshift guys for the most
| up-to-date dump they have and get it in.
|
| Make a system for claiming your old Reddit account. I'm
| guessing if you try to use OAuth, Reddit will just ban you. So
| you need to get creative, probably make an extension that grabs
| the users sessionid from their cookies or something (or let
| people copypaste it in if they are technical enough).
|
| Fun to imagine but unfortunately probably won't happen.
| soeptical wrote:
| Noone will use it
| activiation wrote:
| They are doing the same now.... Reddit will end the same way as
| it begun
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| They don't need to; the incentives are aligned, just as they
| were for Twitter when it was a public company. Banning
| reasonably well-behaved spammers (the competent ones) would
| only serve to lower the IPO price.
| activiation wrote:
| I wasnt talking about spammers... I'm talking about content
| created by Reddit itself.
| EGreg wrote:
| Well, dating sites and other sites that needed to bootstrap to
| critical mass used to do it all the time. YouTube filled their
| site with copyrighted clips.
|
| With AI, it would be far easier to bootstrap a plausible-looking
| site full of "active users", and unscrupulous startups might do
| that.
|
| It is why we built this, which at least is the most ethical
| approach we could come up with, as a service for any community to
| encourage discussion on ghost-town topics, while clearly
| disclosing its bots:
|
| https://app.engageusers.ai
|
| In about the broader debate about generative AI, this seems to be
| one of the least harmful (it has responsible disclosures) and
| most helpful (https://xkcd.com/810/) approaches
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35779455
|
| PS: feel free to use it if you own a Discourse forum, we would
| love to hear feedback
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| It's a solid technique. I did the exact same thing for a news
| site I started with comments on articles and the forum.
|
| No one wants to hang around a 'dead' site, but post enough
| activity, post enough 'controversial' comments and people will
| want to join in, and then suddenly you have an actual ecosystem
| of real people driving traffic.
| Solvency wrote:
| So does every social network.
| dano wrote:
| Price Club #1 on Morena Blvd., San Diego, asked employees,
| friends, and family to park cars in the lot. Seems to work. Of
| course the financials weren't reporting average daily cars in the
| lot either.
| dogmatism wrote:
| This was well known
| Gys wrote:
| Fake it till you make it!
| farmin wrote:
| > Huffman explains the strategy in a video for Udacity, an online
| education service.
|
| The Udacity web development course was my introduction to coding.
| It blew my mind. He was a good teacher.
| squalo wrote:
| And all these years later the site is overrun with botters and
| fake profiles
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Their eventual replacement will have to employ similar
| shenanigans, right? It's basically tradition among social media
| unicorns.
|
| Except now, of course, one can build MUCH more interesting tools
| for pre-seeding communities. Should be fun!
| behnamoh wrote:
| Dating apps do the same. It's kinda easy to spot a bot. I wonder
| what GPT-powered bots will do on such apps.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Many small startups generate fake traffic, either for testing or
| for marketing purposes (e.g. cheating on the numbers).
|
| I would be surprised to find any successful company that had no
| shenanigans in their origin story.
|
| My history included a startup that shipped empty boxes to meet
| numbers, scraped thousands of emails from more popular websites
| to sell as their own traffic, even one that forged stock
| certificates to secure funding. (The FBI ended that one)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, it definitely goes against the economic propaganda that
| the US fed the rest of the world, that you can become wealthy
| by hard and _honest_ entrepreneurship.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I'd guess that this often happens when companies are failing.
| For every one that laughs about it years later with billions
| in market cap, there are 100 that failed.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| LinkedIn famously abused oauth permissions to take over the
| email accounts of their users and send invites to their service
| to the contact list.
|
| Please don't normalize this. Just because it has many famous
| examples does not mean it should ever become socially
| acceptable. Fuck every company that has done this.
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