All of these dummy accounts looked and acted like real users, but it was Steve and Alexis controlling them. And while in the early days it might require a lot of manual searching and posting of content, the two became more clever over time. They began to build software to help them scale this activity—which Steve describes: I wrote some code that would scrape news websites and post them with made-up usernames. That way, it looked like there was an active community. Problem was, it still needed my attention—about a month after launch in July of that year, I went camping with my family and
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