> the easiest way to break the chicken-and-egg problem of network effects is to simply cheat and use bots to make the platform look popular.

In relatively early days of Reddit, before mainstream awareness, I thought it suspicious how clever or knowledgeable so many of the comments were. Better than any other general-purpose venue I could think of.

So, when telling people about Reddit, I'd sometimes remark that I suspected they'd enlisted a bunch of writer shills, to frontload and elevate their comments traffic.

Maybe it was all genuine and organic, and an artifact of the voting system and network effects, while the bar for quality was set so low by some other venues.

Though, years after Reddit was mainstream, I heard something about the founders originally writing a lot of the comments themselves.

If they started out doing this, why wouldn't they continue to do this in the form of click fraud for advertising? Surely if they could create some minimum % of click fraud for each ad, they make more money and it would fly under the radar of their customers looking into it...