In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username.

Huffman explains the strategy in a video for Udacity, an online education service. When reddit was founded in June 2005, Ohanian and Huffman were embarrassed by the blank space on the front page. "If you show up to the site and it's blank, it looks like a ghost town," Huffman says in the video.

So the founders made a small addition to the submission page, visible only to themselves: in addition to the "URL" and "title," there was a "user" field. Ohanian and Huffman could make up a login in the "user" field, and if it wasn't already registered by an actual person, the link would be submitted under the ghost profile. "That did two things," said Huffman. "It set the tone… and it made the site feel alive."

A recent reddit submission shows some screenshots of the very early days of reddit. We could barely discern the usernames in a screenshot from July 4, 2005, but we think we've found a few old, fake profiles: rabble, Meegan, and lampshade. All three accounts had pretty highbrow tastes. But alas, Meegan hasn't submitted in 5 years, while the other two haven't submitted in 6.

This strikes us as a pretty clever way to get a site up and going, disingenuous though it might have been. It's certainly more expedient than the founders harassing their friends to use reddit. It also presents an interesting juxtaposition with reddit's recent decision to ban certain publications' links from submission for trying to game the site.