I find his ethics quite a bore, like many christian thinkers he very quickly skips all the fun bits to jump into "god" as an answer. But the universal maxim principle is quite fun to use as a metric for "small infractions" that are easy to wave away (specially when forgiving yourself) but that would make live hell if everyone did them all the time.

> There weren’t.

They were though. Maybe not explicitly but social contracts are still rules. And despite having usernames and not personaly linked info most people assume 1 nick = 1 person. If I created twelve accounts and replied to you with all of them, sure no "rules" would be broken, but anyone who stumbled upon this conversation would implicitly think a large number of people disagree with you.

Famous users have been banned later into the platforms lifecycle for doing exactly that, just getting a few accounts to upvote themselves. In reddits economy the first 5 upvotes are are good as the next 1000 basically.

> And nobody who liked Reddit then or now would have any problem with what the founders did to simulate activity and get it growing.

They do not know what they could not get. If there was a better app, a better founding team who was chasing Digg's fall but did not cheat they might be left in the dust of history. And in a parallel universe the users would be happier with that platform than they are now on Reddit.

Capitalism could reward something more than speed (or in this case network effects) if someone else had a better platform without sock puppet accounts.

(Similar arguments can be made about the jailbait subreddit and the ethical implications of that and the initial growth of reddit but thats just seeing trends in their ethical behaviour beyond their founding)

You're conflating legal laws with social and moral rules.

Nobody's claiming they broke legal laws; they're claiming they broke social and moral rules.

Rather than discuss that point, you retreat to arguing they didn't break legal laws.