alt Hacker News> 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.
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IIRC Reddit used to have an option that only admins could see that would allow them to write comments under other accounts without going through the trouble of registering them/logging into them/etc.
The internet itself went through a similar growth pattern without astroturf. The original users were all researchers, which served as a strong implicit filter, and then the new users were students who had to be taught Netiquette every September, and eventually the floodgates opened to the public and the academics lost the ability to steer the culture in what was called The Eternal September (1993).
The same "initial implicit filter followed by gradual but inevitable reversion to the mean" dynamic explains your observations of early reddit without implying fraud, although it certainly doesn't imply the absence of fraud either. That said, "fraud" is probably a strong word for reddit astroturf in this present day and age where we have a (comparatively) planet-sized Dead Internet built on geological quantities of ads and slop.
Reddit is an interesting case but at least to me it felt genuine in the early years. Even today I generally trust Reddit comments, but it's important to check the context and commentor before proceeding.
I feel like even though Reddit has undergone various management changes, technology changes, site UI/UX changes -- the core demographic is still there and I hope they don't fuck that up. Once old.reddit.com is gone I'll know the shark has truly jumped. Or maybe someone intelligent will get reigns and understand that domain is not to be fucked with.