How much does the book go into the first few weeks and months of Reddit? I've always been curious about how community sites get started and I was wondering how much in depth the book goes into how you guys bootstrapped Reddit. For instance, does the book go over how you and Steve create dummy accounts and content to seed Reddit? (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, in fact I think it's a legitimate technique) Was the process automated? And how did you guys get the first real users after you tapped out family and friends? I'm hoping the book goes into detail about the nitty gritty stuff like this when it comes to getting users for a community site.
Steve and I submitted under different usernames (no comments back then) but it was entirely manual. Most of the submissions were from "kn0thing" and "spez" but from time to time we'd submit as a different username, to give the appearance of a 'live' site (nothing sadder than an empty reddit).
The first real users after friends and family came after PG linked to us in an essay, fortunately a number of them stuck around and (1% rule) some even started submitting.
I exhausted bloggers pretty equally and back in 2005 there weren't any options beyond that for getting the word out -- just facebook.
What a difference 5 years made. It made launching hipmunk so much easier.
As one of the 1% who followed PG's link (6 year club member), I still consider reddit to be one of the more valuable destinations on teh webz due to the community structure.
Like HN, I often don't even bother with the linked article because the comments usually have so much more value. I think there's even more value to be extracted there if one can find a way to bump back up the S/N ratio....
