How Reddit.com became popular
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts–2
Reddit.com is a popular website that is used for open forum discussion and sharing hyperlinks. How did reddit triumph over the hundreds of other similar websites? According to this article and the video that it cites, they “just faked it ‘til they made it.”
Reddit’s founders “populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts.” Their strategy was to create a façade of popularity in order to draw in real users until the website was self-sustaining. This is an illustration of network effects and information cascading in action.
The founders of Reddit knew that in order to increase the users’ values of their site, they needed to have a lot of existing users. The higher their users value their site, the more likely they will stay around and continue using the site. Creating the façade of having a lot of users draws in new users in two ways.
First, anyone new to the website would think that this site has a lot to offer (that they just haven’t found out by themselves first) since there are a ton of active users. Second, there is also the direct benefit of having a lot of active users on a primarily social website. More users equates to more people to interact with, more content to browse, and therefore more reward for being on reddit. This is exactly what an information cascade is.
This story also illustrates the idea of a tipping point and network effects. Once reddit’s user base reached a critical mass, it pushed over a tipping point, and it just kept growing without the help of fake users.