Ask HN: Has anyone used content generation to jumpstart community?
When Reddit was first starting, the founders used to create dozens of fake accounts, and talk to one another.. It helped give a sense of community, and get people to use the site.<p>There are a number of services out there, such as inb0x.com that do paid forum posting to try to help replicate this same process.<p>There are also text-focused services such as Textbroker, or even Mechanical Turk..<p>Has anyone used such services to get started?
Were the posts any good?<p>Did it help at all, or did it just look cheesy?
1 comments
I did it for http://www.StatusCrap.com when I was just getting started with it. Definitely helped on the SEO side with dynamic content and also with creating the sense of community effect. There's no shame in it :)
Which service did you use, if you don't mind me asking?
I never used a service, I usually just got some sort of conversations started with different profiles and eventually real people started pitching in. Just can take a bit of time and depends on your traffic.