[SwellJoe]

I was a reddit user back when they were populating it themselves. I was not offended to learn later, after meeting them, that they'd made up accounts to populate the site.

I enjoyed the really high quality links they posted; that was the only "contract" I felt like I had with reddit at that point. There was no discussion in the beginning, so the links were all there was, and they were high quality (i.e. I enjoyed reading the linked stories). Faking a community would be much harder, so it's lucky they didn't have to. By the time comments were a part of the experience at reddit, there were enough actual users to make it happen.