"You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there'd be tons of... fake users," Huffman says in a video for online educator Udacity.
Through those fake accounts, Huffman and Ohanian submitted high-quality content -- the type of articles they wanted to read. This "set the tone" for the site as whole, Huffman says and, at the same time, made it look populated.
Internet ghost towns are hardly inviting places. Reddit's army of fake users made the site look far more inviting to timid early explorers.
Still, you need a lot more than dummy accounts to help a website take off and reach more than 35 million unique visitors, as Reddit has. Huffman says he's not sure he and Ohanian would have had the same resounding success if they'd done it all over again.
"Social websites require a little bit of magic to work."