Reddit’s Early Success Was Built on Lies and Thousands of Fake Profiles

The early success of the community-based social website, Reddit, was built on a foundation of deception, according to one of the site’s co-founders.

Steve Huffman has revealed that in the early days of the site, many of the user accounts were created by himself and another co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, he said in an interview with Udacity.

Huffman claimed that the two entrepreneurs created hundreds of fake profiles in order to diversify and populate the site’s content and make it appear more active.

“We did a lot of important things that I think helped. One of which was in the beginning Alexis and I submitted all the content,” he said.

He explained that when Reddit launched in 2005, he and Ohanian were dismayed by the sight of blank spaces on the site’s homepage. “If you show up to the site and it’s blank, it looks like a ghost town,” he added.

Therefore, the two founders added a ‘user’ field to the submission page, visible only to themselves. Whenever they submitted a link, they would create a new ‘ghost’ profile to submit it under.

Doing so, Huffman noted that they managed to “set the tone” on the website, which “made the site feel alive.”

Though it is difficult for current Reddit users to discern the usernames from the early days, three accounts – deemed highbrow in their taste – likely belonged to Huffman and Ohanian themselves.

These ostensibly fake accounts include rabble, Meegan, and lampshade, all of which have not posted in years. Meegan, for instance, hasn’t submitted in 18 years, while the other two haven’t submitted in 19.

Reddit Valuation Drops Over 40% Since 2021

Fidelity, the lead investor in the round, has cut its stake’s estimated worth in Reddit by 41.1%, from $28.2 million to $16.6 million.

The devaluation of Reddit comes as the social media platform aims to go public at a valuation of around $15 billion.

Reddit has already raised over $1 billion and has Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz among its backers.

The downward valuation trend highlights the impact of declining global economic conditions on fledgling startups, although numerous larger startups have managed to maintain their value.

Reddit’s API Pricing Change Sparks Backlash

AI models including ChatGPT and GPT-4 have used publicly available data from sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Stack Overflow to train these LLMs so they can learn what they need to answer almost any query coming from a user.

In a bid to exploit this opportunity, Reddit has announced that it will begin charging for access to its API, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk’s Twitter.

However, the change in API pricing has sparked a backlash among third-party client developers, with protests expected on June 12.

Reddit is now (again) owned by Advance Publications, owners of Vogue, Allure, Glamour, GQ, etc

For years I have been fascinated by people who think that Reddit is some sort of independent, rebellious, organization when in reality it is just another corporate operation.

— Louis Mingüey 🇺🇸 🇪🇸 🇪🇺 (@louisminguey) June 5, 2023

Several hundreds of subreddits have decided to go dark (private) for 48 hours to fight against the policy, which could see Reddit offer its APIs to third-party clients for millions of dollars in fees.

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