This post talks a lot about the chicken and egg problem, and the inventors of Reddit faced the same problem - no one will come to your homepage for the internet if it doesn't look like the homepage for the internet.
Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it. Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted.
Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it took off.
I never heard there was thousands of fake posts, just when they posted articles they used fake accounts. Also there were no fake comments as Reddit launched without the ability to leave comments.
I remember when I built my own social network as well (www.thecaucus.net). The core feature was fancy algorithms similar to pagerank, that calculated a score for each post. This is in contrast to Reddit where the score is directly proportional to the number of people who liked it. I posted a link to it on HN, and got angrily chewed out by someone for misleading people about the number of people using my site. I wonder what they would make out of Reddit literally flooding their site with fake accounts.
Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it. Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted.
Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it took off.
Reddit was built on lies and you can too :)