Uh, yeah, they were. They intentionally created _false_ accounts of people with different names to give the impression that a lot of people were already submitting content to the site.
Unlike all those novelty accounts on reddit. Or, for that matter, unlike your username here, "kami8845", if that is your real name rather than a false name.
The accounts were real enough. They were people (Steve and Alexis) posting interesting stories to their own site. They just happened to give the illusion of lots of people doing it...which is kinda mandatory for a new site, if you want to kickstart it.
Do you not find that misleading to the other users on the site? People come along expecting links chosen by the wisdom of the crowds and end up just getting things two guys find interesting?
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.
