TikTok used a "fake it 'till you make it" growth hack
Apparently, TikTok made fake accounts created with content from Instagram and Snapchat in order to "growth hack" its growth. And that wasn't all:
The former employees described the project as one of several “growth hacks” — including the manipulation of like and video view statistics — employed by the company.
The scraping was done on a massive scale:
One of the former employees said the scraping affected hundreds of thousands of accounts, and a document viewed by BuzzFeed News detailed plans to “crawl video > 10k/day in P0 countries” — according to the former employee, this meant the team’s goal was to scrape more than 10,000 videos a day in the highest priority countries.
This isn't the first company to use the "fake it till you make it" principle. Paypal and Reddit also used this principle to growh.
Curious if anyone here has successfully used the "fake it till you make it" principle for their own product.
I think everyone does to some extent. I sometimes will refer to the team, when it's just me, or having a 'Most popular' plan with only one current subscriber 😅. I think it changes when it becomes malicious and purposely deceitful, then again, some people would say what I have done is exactly that.
everyone fakes it.
twitter & reddit fake it to this day with their bots. their numbers would fall of the cliff if they didn't shut down bots. i mean it's easy to shut down bot activity but they still don't do it which says a lot.
Very smart
Maybe people do not do it as much but you need to start somewhere. If you are working on a marketplace, you do not want to show an empty place to new users. So you need to at least have some "fake" users here to show people they are not alone.
What do you folks think about the ethics of these approaches?
Don't get me wrong, I've also tried and executed some growth hacks (with less success than Tik Tok ;-) ), but I always feel a little... odd... if I read these kinds of growth hacks - where you actually lie to your customers. There are "fake it till you make it" methods where you don't screw the customer (like if you don't have automation in place but a person is doing the "automation" - there the customer still gets what you promise). But here it feels different. Wondering what you think about this.
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