The Internet Loves Anonymity but Hates Dishonesty

Lessons learned from a posting on Reddit

After completing our MVP (the Bay Area’s favorite three letters), the Emjoyment team decided we needed to get real feedback from real users. Thanks mom, dad and friends for the initial feedback, but we needed to hear what others had to say. A wise friend suggested we try out Reddit. Candidly, I’d never used Reddit in my entire life. Here’s our experience from epic failure to surprising success from the perspective of a buddy who saw the whole thing play out and decided to write about it:

“ The Reddit community is not stupid. Do not be fooled by the myriad of cat pictures on the home page. (Gratuitous cat photo included ☺ sorry had to)

In fact, as my good friend Adam learned the hard way this weekend, it is very likely that the Reddit community is a lot smarter than you. It is an elemental force of anonymity doling out endorsement or destruction based on what it merits valuable. It is opinionated and it will crucify you if it smells bullshit. But if you approach it honestly and ask it for help you might be pleasantly surprised by its benevolent guidance. Here is the story of how Reddit’s community took my friend Adam from hubristic to humble in 2 hours… and why you should be honest about your intentions even whilst hiding your identity.

Adam and his cofounders have been hard at work on their new startup, emjoyment.com. The vision is recruiting reimagined for a digital generation. Think what “if Tinder and Monster.com had a baby.” They have been hacking away in their spare time for the last 4-5 months (up until last week they both had full time jobs) and this only recently transitioned from a “side project” to “all I can think about and do every day.” Adam is a first-time founder and, whilst he has tried to read every book and blog post out there that preps you for starting a company, there are areas where he is woefully underprepared. Lessons that one can only learn by doing rather than ruminating on. This is ironically the summary point of all those books and blog posts anyway. So when these resources suggested that it was time Adam took a crack at “growth hacking” and put his company out there in the wild — in actual users hands — he heard from a friend that a good place to dip his toes in the water would be Reddit.

He had never posted on Reddit before though he was vaguely aware of it. It seemed like a simple enough network to use — create a user name and password, type some letters into a box to validate you are human and 10 seconds later you are up and posting. There is no identity check and no incentive to be honest about who you are. Optically, it seemed like the perfect place for an apocryphal post about “coming across a cool new platform that helps you look for jobs.” So he took a crack at a promotional post (that in hindsight was garbagely transparent), claiming he had come across a cool new site that was “like Tinder but for job postings.” He then asked a bunch of my friends to upvote the post. Within minutes, he got burned.

There are so many things that are stupid and bad about that initial post. Here are the top 3:

1. Not putting in the effort to learn the “etiquette” of Reddit before posting and not taking the time to understand the nuance how Reddit works.
2. Assuming that anonymity is an invitation for dishonesty.
3. Thinking that his post wouldn’t be horribly transparent and that somehow these bland sentences would get Reddit users to be excited about his company.

Nothing brings you back down to earth quite like having a stranger say “You straight up lied… maybe don’t start off by immediately destroying all trust in your integrity.” That is a humbling moment delivered with a gut crushing punch that only unfiltered honesty can afford.

When Adam read those comments, he tells me he was in a panic. What to do? Had he just damaged the integrity of his startup before even getting it off the ground? He could have feigned ignorance and risked digging himself into a deeper hole. Instead he took a step back and tried to understand what he had done wrong.

It turns out that a cursory Google search would have told him that the Reddit community is known for calling people on bullshit, especially bullshit posted by a user with no posting history and upvoted by a community of new users. The Reddit community celebrates anonymity but it hates dishonesty. It crushes people for this type of astroturfed junk and Adam would have known that if he had taken a few minutes to do some research before posting.

Lesson: Startups are about moving quickly. But not so quickly that you are uninformed about things you could have known with little effort.

Adam decided to do what at the time felt very risky: be honest and admit he messed up. He posted: “Alright well I learned my first reddit lesson. Going to let this one happen. I will upvote it but nothing else. [I’ll have] one of our founders write what he’s looking for instead [link to new post].”

His cofounder then posted a new thread where he was honest about their company and what they were doing. He ended the post with an admission that he was new to Reddit but admired the platform and hoped to receive meaningful feedback.

Then something amazing and unexpected happened.

People responded. Lots of them. And they gave Adam and his team super meaningful feedback. They pointed out details his team had missed, things they liked, and things that could be improved. Emjoyment received feedback from users in Canada and Europe asking us to get their countries live ASAP. Adam received offers to help us build out mobile apps. And Emjoyment received thousands of site visits and large numbers of signups. The Reddit community was telling Adam that they wanted to use his product and that they would help him make it better so they could use it sooner.

Adam and his team responded to each comment and thanked Redditors profusely for every bit of feedback. They were humbled and, quite frankly, jubilant that a horde of anonymous people had tried their product and offered opinions on how to improve it. The experience gave them the confidence to get more aggressive about marketing their company with their names behind it — on Facebook, direct email and via other sources. And in the 4 days following the incident, Emjoyment received a ton of inbound enquiries from employers looking to get signed up, even an article in crowdsourcing.org.

It seems obvious now that they should have been honest up front with their intentions. And after chatting with Adam I think the reason that he wasn’t upfront and honest was fear. His team was scared to put their baby out into the wild. They were scared that people would reject their baby and hurt its feelings after they had poured their hearts and souls into building it. They were scared they would get ravaged by an anonymous crowd that has little incentive to be nice.

But the implication and dynamic of anonymity is changing.

Whereas anonymity was once the province of those looking to troll the Techcrunch comments section, now millions of dollars are being thrown at networks predicated on this concept (Kleiner and others just invested $1.4 million in Secret and anonymity’s sister technology, ephemerality, is having cash thrown at it).

As Andrew Chen summarizes, “anonymity is a powerful new innovation that dramatically lowers the cost of creating content.”

And people are opening up and being honest in an incredible way. For founders, this presents an opportunity to get one’s product into the hands of actual users and receive unfiltered, brutally honest feedback. Since the tradeoff of anonymity is a disassociation from any prior qualifications, users’ posts are judged based on the perceived value of their content alone. This seems to lead to high-quality feedback from anonymous sources (at least that was Adam’s experience with Reddit) with the added benefit of shelter from ad hominem dismissal.

Of course, anonymous feedback is hardly a new concept. It has been employed by my bank teller and local diner for years. Rather, what is new is anonymous feedback from a massive and highly engaged network that moves and spreads with unprecedented speed and has an exceptionally low “cost” of creating content. This is a powerful force for both promotion and destruction.

Approach it with honesty and it might help you iterate your idea. Approach it with bullshit and prepare to walk away with your tail between your legs.

Adam tells me that he is glad he got his ass handed to him by Reddit and he is glad to have learned this lesson early. The tech community accepts cheekiness, even celebrates it, but it does not have time for your half-assed dishonest attempts at self promotion. Going forward Emjoyment will be brutally honest with their intent and with their customers. They will be humble but remain highly aggressive about getting their product in the hands of users. Recruitment can be done better and Emjoyment wants to help fix it.”

Thank you very much for reading this far. I am grateful for having a friend who was willing to write so much about this. He’d asked that he remain anonymous, otherwise I would gladly have given him the credit he so deserves for his piece.

If you would like to see how we are reimagining recruiting, please check us out at emjoyment.com. We would love your feedback, anonymous or otherwise. You can also check out our blog here and follow us on Facebook for updates

Thanks again,

Adam