this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Reddit is astroturfed from day 1. By that I mean they literally faked it until they made it as in the early days Reddit was 100% consisted of sock puppets, whose activity convinced outside people to join.
It's long forgotten how reddit was open source. Not only that but people hosted their own instances of reddit as test beds for botting and who knows what else.
The quickmeme incident got memoryholed real fast. That era of image macro memes was basically entirely fabricated.
What quickmeme incident? I must have missed that one.
They used sockpuppet accounts to game r/adviceanimals to push posts from quickmeme.com to the top and bury their competitors. At the time it was the most popular image macro site and subreddit. Once it was exposed, that format of meme basically collapsed.