I can think of several things the Reddit founders have done to summon bad karma, but a bit of sockpuppeting in the first few weeks to prevent the site from being empty is not one of them. How many people who visited Reddit in those days and enjoyed the content would have ever complained about being “deceived”. Absolutely zero. Nobody cared then and people only care now so as to fingerwag.
His ethic treaties are the most boring of his work, but Kant the german philosopher had an opinion on ethics around your actions becoming universal.
So in this case, would you want most internet traffick to be sock puppets that increase visibility for companies?
I think the obvious answer is no. So if we do not want to have the entire internet be fake content pretending to be organic users, we should not want it for Reddit either
> So in this case, would you want most internet traffick to be sock puppets that increase visibility for companies?
I might if it were only for the first few weeks/months of a totally new internet almost nobody except sock puppets was logging into. If there's nothing on the new internet, anyone who does log in will log out once they see they can't find anything.
> So if we do not want to have the entire internet be fake content pretending to be organic users, we should not want it for Reddit either
No one wants the entirety of reddit to be fake content, and thankfully it isn't because the founders could back off once they got momentum. Of course there are still sockpuppets on reddit, and the internet as a whole, but that doesn't mean there's never a time, a place, duration, or proportion at which they're acceptable.
It's kind of like saying: "You should never ever eat ice cream because of how terrible it would be if everyone on the entire planet ate nothing at all but ice cream for every single meal. We'd all get sick so clearly eating ice cream at any point for any length of time must be inherently wrong!"
Yep thats one of the criticisms of his Ethics (there are plenty others).
But the problem is, there is no arbitror on what amount, duration, or proportion is acceptable. Being inherently dishonest from the start, there is absolutely no way to know what percentage of early, or current Reddit content is inorganic.
The problem with "I will break the rules a little" is that its a gateway drug. Corruption does not start from someone signing a blood diamonds deal with a warlord, but with people in the org thinking small ways to not do things "by the book" and escalating from there. Thats the reason there is "a book", because if we all agree on the rules and we let those who cheat win, then the ones who cheat the most will win every time. (See taxation loopholes for another glaring example).
You could always have transparent inorganic content. "Admin_cat_content", "Admin_politics_content" as named accounts, post some content and people clearly know who is behind the content, and the type of stuff they are sharing, the communities they are fostering etc. Or you could have an existing network that you leverage (like harvard students for facebook) instead of starting a social media with fake accounts.
If Kant is being invoked about this we might have strayed into the weeds just a little!
> The problem with "I will break the rules a little"
So this whole argument presupposes there were any “rules” that were broken.
There weren’t. It was/is an anonymous site, where anyone could/can register any number of usernames and post whatever they want under each one. And nobody who liked Reddit then or now would have any problem with what the founders did to simulate activity and get it growing. It is only people like finding reasons to finger-wag who fixate on this.
Honestly there is room for playfulness in how we start products/companies and how we look at it years later.
There is no social/moral rule against simulating usage on a brand new website that has no organic usage.
People in this thread are writing whole screeds arguing the importance of condemning this supposed moral breach, but it’s a case of the beg the question fallacy: people are seeking to prove there was a moral breach by assuming there was a moral breach.
I say again: nobody who was an early organic visitor to Reddit has ever complained of being deceived or harmed, and indeed they self-evidently benefited by finding content they liked and a site they wanted to post to.
Also: from the very start of this subthread my main point has been against grumpiness, and people keep grumpily replying, apparently trying to defend the importance of grumpiness. I mean, sure!
> If Kant is being invoked about this we might have strayed into the weeds just a little!
I find his ethics quite a bore, like many christian thinkers he very quickly skips all the fun bits to jump into "god" as an answer. But the universal maxim principle is quite fun to use as a metric for "small infractions" that are easy to wave away (specially when forgiving yourself) but that would make live hell if everyone did them all the time.
> There weren’t.
They were though. Maybe not explicitly but social contracts are still rules. And despite having usernames and not personaly linked info most people assume 1 nick = 1 person. If I created twelve accounts and replied to you with all of them, sure no "rules" would be broken, but anyone who stumbled upon this conversation would implicitly think a large number of people disagree with you.
Famous users have been banned later into the platforms lifecycle for doing exactly that, just getting a few accounts to upvote themselves. In reddits economy the first 5 upvotes are are good as the next 1000 basically.
> And nobody who liked Reddit then or now would have any problem with what the founders did to simulate activity and get it growing.
They do not know what they could not get. If there was a better app, a better founding team who was chasing Digg's fall but did not cheat they might be left in the dust of history. And in a parallel universe the users would be happier with that platform than they are now on Reddit.
Capitalism could reward something more than speed (or in this case network effects) if someone else had a better platform without sock puppet accounts.
(Similar arguments can be made about the jailbait subreddit and the ethical implications of that and the initial growth of reddit but thats just seeing trends in their ethical behaviour beyond their founding)
There is no “social contract” against simulating usage on a site that has no organic usage.
> a better founding team who was chasing Digg's fall but did not cheat
Every new social site has to find some trick to kickstart usage and break out of their chicken-and-egg trap. There’s no “cheating” to speak of here. It’s playfulness. The teams that tried and failed to grow this kind of thing would have failed due to a lack of playfulness and imagination.
I say again, we can afford to see the fun in this, and commenters might reflect on their need to react to my appeal against grumpiness by replying with more grumpiness.
> There is no “social contract” against simulating usage on a site that has no organic usage
If we cannot agree that most people expect nick to mean one person then we are not gonna agree on anything else. But that is one of the most basic assumptions of anonymous internet comms since IRC.
> Every new social site has to find some trick to kickstart usage and break out of their chicken-and-egg trap.
good marketing, leveraging existing IRL networks, transparent content from the founding team.
Youtube made a video with the creators at the zoo, Facebook used harvard students knowing each other irl, etc.
> There’s no “cheating” to speak of here. It’s playfulness.
They say the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Playfullness is a very cute way to frame deceit, but its still a lie to most.
Grumpiness out of the market rewarding liars and cheaters is the obvious, and normal response. The proposed goal of a market led economy is the efficient market hypothesis, if you find obvious, glaring, examples of non optimal solutions (such as cheating, corruption, law breaking, scams, deceit, fraud etc) being rewarded instead of punished then yeah you should be grumpy.
Please try and step outside yourself for a moment and consider how many extreme words (hell, deceit, lie, cheating, corruption, law breaking, scams, fraud) you've included in this comment, about an act that nobody has ever claimed to be harmed by and no government agency has ever expressed any concerns about, and by your own argumentation can only be deemed wrong according to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, which is no objective standard of morality at all - just one person's musings a couple of centuries ago. If the Reddit foundation story was as self-evidently heinous as you're insisting, you wouldn't need to use all those charged words.
> how many extreme words (hell, deceit, lie, cheating, corruption, law breaking, scams, fraud)
Extreme words? Half of them are simple descriptive nouns of legal parameters being broken?
> about an act that nobody has ever claimed to be harmed by and no government agency has ever expressed any concerns about
"Nobody has ever claimed to be harmed by", seems wrong considering Reddit has now banned the practice, Hacker news bans the practice, Steam bans the practice and most anonoymous online forums have explicit rules against fake account, multiple accounts etc?
If nobody is harmed why are they explicitly banned by the large part of the ecosystem? Also the goverment in multiple countries has proposed end of anonimity bans, things like tying your twitter to your driver license or passport. In what universe is that "no goverment has expressed concern" when they went full end of privacy over it?
> by your own argumentation can only be deemed wrong according to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant
That was a simple thought experiment, and no, by my own argumentation it is wrong entirely based on the fact its deceitful. And lies are inherently wrong. In this case they disrupt one of the assumptions of the market model, but in any social interaction they usually break a rule. In conversation they would break one of Grice's maxims.
> If the Reddit foundation story was as self-evidently heinous as you're insisting, you wouldn't need to use all those charged words.
They deceitfully added content to their site. I dont know how that is a charged adjective, its what they did by definition. The rest of them where in relation to other points, things like corruption and scams grow from small deceits, that is just studied psychology.
- Reddit, HN, X/Twitter, Instagram, plenty of other sites have no bans on the kind of usage of multiple accounts that the Reddit founders were doing. Plenty of people have multiple accounts for all kinds of different purposes and nobody considers it wrong. The kind of sockpuppeting/astroturfing/self-posting/ringvoting that is banned on social sites is very different, and banned for very different reasons, vs. the early Reddit conduct.
- 'In what universe is that "no goverment has expressed concern" when they went full end of privacy over it?' - "...over it" is a complete falsehood and another sign you're on weak ground. Some governments have proposed identity requirements on social media platforms but for reasons that have nothing to do with anything the Reddit founders did for a few weeks in 2005.
- "it is wrong entirely based on the fact its deceitful. And lies are inherently wrong" - As I wrote elsewhere, we all accept that mistruths can be benign, beneficial or funny in some circumstances; white lies, pranks, jokes, stunts, hacks. It all comes back to who was harmed, and you still can't name a case of someone who was harmed by what Reddit did, you've only suggested hypotheticals and inferences.
I've certainly spent enough time in this discussion, and I know it's a bad look on HN to perpetuate tit-for-tat arguments, so I'm certainly out. When I engage in a lengthy discussion like this, which I don't do often, it's to try and figure out what I'm missing about a topic - i.e., what has someone thought of about this that I haven't thought of?
What I see in some of your comments is at least borderline fulmination, which is in breach of the HN guidelines. I also see in this and other of your comments, as well as those from others taking the same position in the subthread, several cases of the beg-the-question fallacy: that is, trying to prove that this act was something egregious by assuming it was egregious, and using words that necessarily characterise it as the worst kind of transgression, when the severity of the transgression is the very thing that's in question.
The right way to discuss this topic is to explore exactly what kind of deception was committed and who was actually harmed by it, but I'm just seeing repeated insistences that we accept that this was a terrible act, without any earnest effort to demonstrate it.
> Reddit, HN, X/Twitter, Instagram, plenty of other sites have no bans on the kind of usage of multiple accounts that the Reddit founders were doing.
Reddit founders were posting, commenting and using various accounts. It all fits astroturning and sockpuppeting. Again if they wanted to just have content there is 0 reason to not disclose they are admins. They pretended it was organic for a reason.
> Some governments have proposed identity requirements on social media platforms but for reasons that have nothing to do with anything the Reddit founders did for a few weeks in 2005.
Stopping bots astrofurning (more i the political context) is a reason given both in US and UK proposals. So yeah goverments have mentioned "people pretending to be more than they are" as a reason. You can be extremely nitpicky and pretend that it doesn't cover this case, but its certainly in the intention of the law.
> you still can't name a case of someone who was harmed by what Reddit did
Every other forum that provided a similar service. From niche forums, that were gobbled up by reddit, to other digg alternatives. Reddit swallowed communities with insane growth, all predicated on fake engagement. If you make a hoodie brand and buy 10,000 followers on instagram and people think you are popular and you jump over other brands who are doing a better job, you have lied and deprived people from finding those other brands that had a better product.
> The right way to discuss this topic is to explore exactly what kind of deception was committed and who was actually harmed by it
The deception was non transparent content, predicated on the expectations of the audience, intended to portray the product as more popular than it is. This lie vulnerates the predicate of honesty of the optimal market hypothesis which is the basis of the modern market economy. The people who were harmed where thus direct competitors and future consumers because those are the intended parties of the optimal market hypothesis.
