Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move

http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-phsyorg-businessweek/

by th0ma5 • 14 years ago

266 188 14 years ago

dalke4• 14 years ago

Yay! I've gotten annoyed at seeing the links in HN to theatlantic.com and others, posted by people who only post dozens of links to a single domain, and who never respond to comments in the thread.

sp3322• 14 years ago

That was odd to me, because even people at The Atlantic know that doesn't work here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285156

dalke4• 14 years ago

Just for reference, here's Alex Madrigal's submission list: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alexismadrigal . Self-posts links to theatlantic every week or more.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nbj914 posts links to "outsideonline.com"

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jnickhughes posts links (almost) only to soentrepreneurial.com.

I've seen others, but these were the easiest to find.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

nhebb gives a great example of someone who has the same name as an Atlantic writer who appears to post only links to stories on the Atlantic written by them. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108929)

drivingmenuts• 14 years ago

Don't a lot of those companies hire professional astro-turfers to do their dirty work anyway?

Besides, how hard is it to point to a proxy that forwards to the spam site?

antonioevans• 14 years ago

I tend to post to reddit from my website once every few weeks when the article is specifically good and "redditable". I would hope that is not a potential ban target.

What probably is happening is that theatlantic / businessweek had a group of up voters that they paid (staff) that would constantly manipulate the voting.

heretohelp2• 14 years ago

I actually know that Cheong fellow and have visited him and his family in Asia.

I know exactly what sort of work he does, and frankly, I'm not sure what he did wrong.

yolesaber2• 14 years ago

Ian Cheong?

heretohelp2• 14 years ago

Aye.

diminoten2• 14 years ago

The single most common complaint on Reddit about Reddit is its lack of original content. "Repost!" would be the rallying cry of Redditors, if ever there was one. This move takes those people who do create original content, and throws them out on their collective asses.

Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

dangrossman3• 14 years ago

> Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

That's exactly what was done. These publications have employees manipulating social media sites. They're not just submitting stories, they're actively spamming for traffic.

diminoten2• 14 years ago

The article says that people who post their own content get banned from Reddit if they cross some ambiguous threshold of self promotion.

I think self promotion shouldn't be frowned upon on Reddit, only when someone manipulates the aggregator.

mayneack5• 14 years ago

The reason (I think) is that these places are doing it intentionally from the top down instead of just some random person within their organization or pushing an agenda. If they can successfully identify when domains are coordinating this and make the bans temporary, then this is probably a good discouragement of the abuse. If their detection methods are wrong and they're either banning too many or not enough, then it probably won't.

ktsmith• 14 years ago

Several of these well known content producers have been caught spamming and otherwise cheating their way onto the front page. They've been banned for that and not their content.

pg• 14 years ago

We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications with well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we just take away the voting ring members' ability to vote.

jaaron• 14 years ago

Which seems a much better approach than outright banning/censoring domains.

mayneack5• 14 years ago

It seems to me that if a publication really wants to beat the system, banning users can only work to a certain degree. If you really want to stop them from trying, banning a whole domain seems like a good way to persuade them as long as the bans are temporary.

Disclaimer: I have no idea how effective the user banning methods are, but I assume they can be outsmarted more than domain ban.

koglerjs2• 14 years ago

HN doesn't have nearly the mass and concomitant crowd problems of Reddit, though.

Not that it banning domains is ideal, but effective implementation is often more important.

rudiger• 14 years ago

Interesting. Is this implemented similarly to "hellban"? Which is to say, does it appear that the votes are valid to the voting rings, or are they shown something else entirely?

tomjen3• 14 years ago

The problem is that the atlantic tends to post things worth reading (and their articles tend to be better than most blog posts) so really if you ban them, hn suffers.

benologist• 14 years ago

If it's really worth reading someone else will submit it.

picklefish• 14 years ago

It's temporary.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Even if it wasn't temporary, it's not like people don't know where to find articles from The Atlantic.

boreacrat• 14 years ago

According to a Reddit admin they contact the offenders before banning.

This type of action would merit some type of direct contact with the individuals or company who run the domain.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...

WillyF• 14 years ago

Do they know that their ability to vote has been taken away? Or do they have to figure it out for themselves? I would guess that it would be more effective if they thought their votes still counted.

alexanderh2• 14 years ago

That is typically how "shadow banning" on reddit works. You have no idea you've been banned, and everything appears to work as normal.

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

I deal with so many folks trying to scam our search engine every day I can't imagine the hordes at that gate here.

Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy.

So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot cud all day.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse.

Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude.

This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it.

In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.

Estragon2• 14 years ago

How is a robot used to scam a search engine? Are they stealing your results on a per-search basis?

redthrowaway2• 14 years ago

>So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse.

Reddit does do this, through shadowbans. Apparently, they felt that they weren't effective enough in discouraging antisocial behaviour.

AznHisoka2• 14 years ago

Trying to scam Blekko alone, or all search engines?

nhebb2• 14 years ago

I've spotted The Atlantic going some cheesy things, and as much as I like some of their content, it really dims my opinion of them. For instance, take a look at these two submissions on the same day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074345

-- and --

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074230

These point, respectively, to the following url's. Notice the slight url difference in what is actually the same article.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou...

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

This will really blow your mind, then:

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/this-part-actually-does-not-matter/258139/

Feel free to change the next-to-last part to whatever you like.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

Is he only posting links to his own articles at his employer? He should, really, make that a bit clearer in his profile.

I think I'd be a bit more worried if someone posted a variety of link-baity slugs to the same story.

mkramlich2• 14 years ago

It's funny because if you look at the HN poster's submissions, @mattobrian, his submit history is all Atlantic, Atlantic, Atlantic, Atlantic, etc., until 7 hours ago for the last 2 months when, boom, he posts a link to Slate. Feeling a change in the wind direction?

fpp2• 14 years ago

Then I would also like to see the government sponsored ones to be banned - guess that might be impossible.

One of the worst examples of that is the so-called Global Fund to fight AIDS etc - actually burring any critics on a scandal where billions of your tax payers' money earmarked for development aid disappeared with some of the worst criminals on this planet - and dozens of millions continue to die from that.

There is no perfect world with social networks - you have to take everything happening there with a "grain of salt"

campnic• 14 years ago

How hard would it be just to expose the information on who up-voted an article? That would leave it open to easy mining to figure out up-voting trends.

taylorbuley• 14 years ago

I've been collecting examples of people who at-a-glance submit mostly their own stuff or stuff from their employer. It's not short.

https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5

I don't personally think it's a bad thing to submit one's own stuff (who doesn't like DanielBMarkham's agile posts or Jeff Barr's AWS stuff?); I just like to keep lists.

possibilistic• 14 years ago

I'm kind of unnerved by this.

What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion?

You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned.

Finally, how does someone get 'off' your list?

_delirium• 14 years ago

I don't think it's always a bad thing, either, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. A regular HN user who sometimes submits something they wrote, when they think it would be of interest to HN, is quite a bit different from an account that exists solely to auto-submit every post from a blog to HN, without otherwise participating.

csphy• 14 years ago

how do you detect these "Voter rings?"

danenania• 14 years ago

I think this is an area that could still use improvement. It seems to have reached a point where the chances for an average HNer to get exposure and feedback on projects in Show/Ask HN type posts is really low. It's a shame because HN is a top-notch community, but it just doesn't feel accessible to people without pre-existing clout in the industry, popularity on the site, or the facility and willingness to use aggressive promotion tactics.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think innovation on this front could help to preserve and enhance HN's vibrancy.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Any advice on good papers to read about identifying voting rings?

joshu• 14 years ago

The Atlantic shows up WAY more often on HN than I think is likely, as well. I think on the New page, the user's top domains ought to be shown...

diogenescynic• 14 years ago

Seems like a purely anti-competitive move considering that Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and most of those sites blocked are direct competitors to Conde Naste's publications. Conflict of interest.

mertd• 14 years ago

I don't know if this changes anything but I think recently they moved up in the pecking order to be sister companies with CN.

However banning competitors outright vs banning competitors that spam are two different things.

creativityland• 14 years ago

But when and where do you draw the line?

Here's the top comment from reddit...

Not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand if they were cheating then blocking them makes sense, on the other hand, I don't see a public list, and this could be abused by admins to block unfavorable sources (maybe not the current admins, but who knows what batch of admins we'll get in the future?)

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Reddit is no longer owned by Conde Nast and is now an independent company.

owenkahn• 14 years ago

According to Wikipedia, they share a parent company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

tokenadult• 14 years ago

As long as the good articles from The Atlantic (and many are quite good) keep getting posted here by regular participants who respond to other participants, I suppose it is okay for members of voting rings to lose voting privileges. I would hate to see whole publications banned just because of the actions of their paid supporters, when the same publications have willing readers who like the content of the publications.

jaems33• 14 years ago

That's basically my thought too. Seems like it makes more sense to penalize members or adjust the scoring of the source rather than ban it altogether.

jerrya2• 14 years ago

"I would hate to see whole publications banned just because of the actions of their paid supporters,"

It seems there is a simple solution to this...

nooneelse3• 14 years ago

If only there were some way for the publications to stop writing those checks, or somehow make them contingent on the "supporters" not spamming sites that don't want to be spammed... but what could it be? </sarcasm>

spindritf• 14 years ago

This is crazy, Phys.org may be a little spammy but it's one of the best sites on the Internet. It constantly pops up in my Twitter feed and rarely disappoints.

sp3322• 14 years ago

It's not about the site being "spammy", it's about site operators actively spamming reddit with article submissions.

sente• 14 years ago

I'm glad phys.org and science daily are banned, I think /r/science and other subreddits will be better without them. They're both interesting sites, yes, but they blast out articles about X Y or Z if a scientist somewhere finds a b or c.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong. It is the Daily Mail of science.

showerst4• 14 years ago

This is a pretty interesting move, but they really need to make sure the rules are ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to those willing to learn them.

I work for ForeignPolicy.com, which could loosely be described as a competitor to the Atlantic. To avoid being spammy/bad community members, we specifically don't submit all of our pieces to reddit/HN, or even all the ones we think are relevant (Virtually our whole site would fit, say, /r/worldnews. HN less so, but occasionally FP stories do rise to the top here). Most major things get submitted anyway, and often drive a fair bit of traffic.

That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible.

It would be nice if we could get some sort of account that would let us submit our relevant content, but without any special privileges a la' the publisher feeds that helped ruin digg.

We _could_ just get people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to trade off in submitting our stuff, but that still strikes me as too spammy.

I know in the comments thread on reddit Alienth said that this action will only be taken in cases where they can prove that the sites knowingly offended [1], but it really worries me that the lines aren't set in stone, and a competitor could potentially make a very compelling attempt at spamming all of our links and get us banned.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...

saraid216• 14 years ago

> That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible.

I think that the first two are ultimately good things. The headline and the timing can be more useful as feedback than as part of the message you control.

As for the third, the key is figuring out how to get notified when something is submitted. If it's important enough, then the "work quite a bit harder" is worth the investment.

jerrya2• 14 years ago

I really like the content of FP and the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, I already have a feedreader, and I don't need to see HN, or reddit turned into another RSS feed or twitter.

If your stuff is good it will rise to the top.

In the meantime, especially at HN, it crowds out less well known sources and authors and bloggers.

cookiecaper2• 14 years ago

Is there some good reason publishers shouldn't have an API to submit their stories automatically and then let the votes do their thing? The concepts of an official content feed and democratic filtration of stories are not mutually exclusive.

fluidcruft• 14 years ago

There might be something workable if RSS aggregation functionality were built into reddit and subreddit moderators/owners could add approved feeds to their subreddits as a sort of "tickler" stream. So when you browse to new you would see something like "new | rising | unsubmitted". That could actually be useful for some of the low-volume, off-the-beaten-path specialist subreddits.

showerst4• 14 years ago

You do have a point about crowding, and I actually like the system as it is.

That said, as a bigger content provider, I think the system of "Someone almost certainly will submit your content anyway, but with a title and timing that that they choose, and you don't get a fair shot at preempting them" is a bit frustrating.

That's of course the nature of the internet, and I don't want an HN/Reddit where publishers have _exclusive_ control or spamability.

look_lookatme• 14 years ago

"If your stuff is good it will rise to the top."

That's never the case on any of these sites.

davidw• 14 years ago

I would posit that nearly everything on ForeignPolicy.com is off-topic for Hacker News, since it's about politics and things of that ilk.

That does not mean it's "bad" or unimportant (quite the contrary, it's probably more important than 'hacker news') or anything like that.

showerst4• 14 years ago

Generally true to be sure, but every once in a while we'll write something about internet or entrepreneurship that does well here.

Like I said we make it a point not to post our own articles to social media sites ourselves, but we do make the HN front page one a month or so, and it would be nice to have the option to control over the titles and submission timing when the content is relevant (assuming, of course, that we submitted the link first =P).

robryan• 14 years ago

Yeah timing is a big one, if someone submits one of your stories at the wrong time it could quickly fall off the map, despite being a potential top story at the right time.

plorkyeran• 14 years ago

> have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible

Setting up automated alerts for when HN starts showing up in the referer log for an article seems like a fairly easy way to handle this.

mayneack5• 14 years ago

Do mirrors still work? Like posting the google cache instead of the original article.

citricsquid5• 14 years ago

Yes, all the block does is check if the domain matches a domain that is blocked, nothing more. Using a redirect domain will get around the block, the changes are here on github: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/44ebdeb378f4bf09d6bd...

citricsquid5• 14 years ago

The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a "work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator. reddit used to be a great site and there are parts of it that still are, but the majority of the "visible" content (stuff that you don't have to search out) sucks.

The subreddit idea is fantastic but I don't understand why they aren't making this their focus. A netflix style recommendation system for subreddits would improve the quality of reddit 10 fold and give it a chance of lasting the next few years. I'm a fairly typical and regular reddit user and the sort of spam they're banning rarely (if ever) affects me, I've never seen a link on the front page and thought "what is this doing here?", focusing on this seems misguided.

phene• 14 years ago

The biggest issue is that people still think of reddit as a single community. It's not, and you can't stereotype all of reddit by looking at /r/pics and /r/politics. You have control over your home page and can remove noisy subreddits from it.

citricsquid5• 14 years ago

I addressed this in my comment. I am aware that each individual user controls their own reddit, my problem is it is very difficult to find good relevant subreddits without relying on third party tools (which very few users are aware exist) or randomly stumbling upon subreddits through comments or cross posts. If there was a reddit system that could match my voting preferences to specific subreddits (for example if I upvote Minecraft content in r/gaming it recommends r/minecraft) the quality of the site for each individual user would increase. If the quality of each individuals reddit experience increased the entire site would improve.

baq3• 14 years ago

that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem. the reason for the lowest common denominator winning is because it is the lowest common denomitator - it has the biggest ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. the answer isn't focus, it's moderation: see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc. all those success stories have one thing in common: active, relentless, remorseless moderation. this is something pg understands well and is also the foundation of hacker news.

re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.

citricsquid5• 14 years ago

> see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc.

That's exactly my point: I did not know that r/games existed until I saw a post in r/gaming recommending it, at which point I subscribed and my reddit gaming experience improved greatly and I have since submitted highly upvoted articles to that subreddit, thus improving the experience of other r/games subscribers (they got the sort of content they wanted to see).

If each individual reddit user is subscribed to 20 subreddits they care about vs. 10 default ones that are just content dumps with no real target audience then the individual redditors would have a much better experience which will in turn improve the experience of others.

koglerjs2• 14 years ago

>that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem.

as such it's a problem reddit has to deal with?

lifeisstillgood3• 14 years ago

  moderation. this is something pg understands well and is   
  also the foundation of hacker news.

This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense? I have been here years and not noticed anything other than peer pressure. I would like to know if I am missing something obvious like meta.news

Peer• 14 years ago

With a recommendations system, obscure subreddits would have the opportunity/disaster of being blown up in a matter of days, which would destroy some communities. I think for some subreddits, it's better if they're spread with the word of mounth to keep their culture. It's also fairly easy to find subreddits of one's interest anyway and I also believe most active redditors already have unsubscribed to almost all of the top 100 subreddits.

zevyoura• 14 years ago

To be fair, this already happens when a good, small subreddit is linked in one of the top comments on a popular post.

cookiecaper2• 14 years ago

Such is the paradox of "social". As a group gains more members from the general pool of people, the group by definition trends closer and closer to average. If you read a site because its content is exceptional and the readership decides what content is displayed, you almost necessarily get inferior content as more people join (unless you control the pool from which you are recruiting users).

bhrgunatha• 14 years ago

There was a recommendation system in place, 4 or 5 years ago, before even sub-reddits were introduced. The problem was that the recommendation engine wasn't very good, and that it was resource intensive as you suspected. For a long time there was talk about re-implementing it, but it's never re-appeared. I guess that's down to their growth rate and heavy reliance on cacheing.

Still I would love to see some sort of discovery mechanism for sub-reddits. The tools reddit provides for casual discovery and management are just laughably poor, but I suppose it's down to priorities a staff availability.

moron• 14 years ago

Why would you use a discussion about spam on reddit to specifically move away from discussing spam on reddit?

Honesty, I feel exactly the same way you do about the issue you raise. But it's not germane here.

heed• 14 years ago

>The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a "work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator.

Yeah, mainstream reddit sucks, but there's always smaller subreddits.

wauter• 14 years ago

I personally like how it's not too easy to find subreddits, and how it happens mostly trough people mentioning them. It keeps many communities nice and small and protected from the 'lowest common denominator' effect.

Of course this means I may be missing out, but that doesn't bother me too much.

I found a couple of wonderful subreddits by just typing the most obvious subreddit address btw (r/piano ...). And once you have found one subreddit on a topic, most of them are kind enough to put links to related subreddits in their sidebar.

(only example I can think of now is r/drunk and r/cripplingalcoholics, though that's maybe not the ideal choice :-))

tanglesome• 14 years ago

Reddit work safe? The front page of Reddit is mostly images these days with titles like ""I said, does he look like a bitch?" and "letter from conde nast to reddit - cover your genitals. Judging from that I'd say Reddit main audience is 13-year old boys.

Rickasaurus• 14 years ago

Still, you can create your own front page and leave all of that behind. I just watch math machinelearning askscience science and RealReddit pretty much.

cjlars• 14 years ago

I've often wondered why no social news systems support a so called "smart vote." We could get a quick estimate from a user's comment history using a Flesch-Kincaid test (technically this guesses at writing grade level, but close enough) and then incorporate that into the voting system by over-weighting high scoring users vs other users. The important part in gathering top quality social news isn't that everyone has a say, it's that we simply get good content. Of course the whole 'your vote matters less than his' thing could be disastrous for an online community.

baq3• 14 years ago

this will blow up. hopefully the bans are interim measures and something more advanced is under development.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Reddit has a horribly broken spam filtering system for comments and links, which frequently catches legitimate posts, and then people have to ask subreddit moderators to mark them as "not spam".

Why? Well, moderator abuse. Moderators can mark stories and comments as spam to get rid of them. But there is always moderator abuse. So the spam filter has got trained on tons of comments and links that aren't spam.

How would they fix it? Give moderators a means to get rid of bad posts other than marking them as spam.

zem• 14 years ago

this has been implemented (fairly recently). there are now both "remove spam" and "remove ham" options, the latter removing a post without using it as spamfilter input.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Ah, that's good. I haven't done any reddit moderation in quite a while.

theon144• 14 years ago

That feature was added a month or two ago, I think.

danso2• 14 years ago

Isn't this heavy-handed banning approach pretty much a tacit admission that the voting algorithm is broken? Why couldn't this spamming be prevented through pattern algorithms/frequency analysis and...this is what I thought Reddit aspired to...democracy? If a lot of articles from a source are voted up by a diverse group of users, then maybe it's because the source is good?

The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?

nooneelse3• 14 years ago

Another possibility would be prominently marking submissions from spammers. And/or all links to sites that are proven spammers. Let the users/communities have more information to cogitate with when deciding if the content is worth voting up.

freshhawk• 14 years ago

> The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?

Well, the easiest answer to that is that one of the best ways to separate the good content from the bad algorithmically is to look at the submitter behavior. Saying "as long as the content is good" glosses over the practicalities of actually measuring that.

cpunks2• 14 years ago

reddit don't aspire to democracy. Note that the set of links on the default page aren't the most popular or up-voted; they are from a pre-selected set of reddits that e.g. include atheism but not e.g. hinduism. This gives a feedback loop -- Hindus see offensive hate speech, and go away. Atheists see an accepting community, and more come in. The types of content and community you see there is clearly engineered -- I think most incidentally, and a little intentionally.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

I find this kind of fascinating after Digg v4, which basically tried to ban everyone else but mainstream publications.

naner• 14 years ago

The first thing that came to mind was that anybody might be able to get someone else's site banned from Reddit by making it look like they are trying to spam/game the site.

daenz• 14 years ago

It seems that "The Front Page of the Internet" only includes some of the internet.

philip1209• 14 years ago

I hope they ban link shorteners, too. As I recall, they both violate site policy and are prominent.

albertsun• 14 years ago

People realize that most professional news publications now have social media editors or social media teams whose job it is to make that publications content popular on social media sites and in online communities right?

Seems like Jared Keller was doing exactly his job description and got the whole domain banned.

lhnn2• 14 years ago

If Reddit wanted to end karma whoring in general (to an extent), they'd move to a slashdot system where numbers are hidden, and only vague ranges (bad, new, good, excellent) are given.

It wouldn't completely rid the site of the bigger voting rings, but it would cut back on many individuals who spam posts looking for a quick turnaround.

fpp2• 14 years ago

Content is the most important if you want to create a sustainable sharing based model.

But, generally with reddit since quite some time the frequency of which the content is repeating is shortening substantially: Try for yourself - have a look at imgur and point out the images that you have not seen during the last 24/36 months repeating over and over ( not counting the variations of cat pics, funny heads etc)

So that is their mainstream - but there are many other still functional areas underneath.

Now if we are talking mainstream that's where this ban of BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost comes into play.

When an organisation like reddit that is facing a more and more immanent lack of content bans content - well looking at that as a desperate move might be kind.

In other words - they have lost the understanding of their own business model or more precisely the underlying principle of their overall existence - sharing content.

So if those sites are the ones who share the most content - fine - IMHO at least most of them are known to have created value content for many years (some for decades and beyond).

The whole thing that a shop like reddit might achieve with that is pushing more and more of their long time supporters to the sites where the most of its content originates from.

Or in other words - sure wag the dog - or even better - post the whole thing on AOL, digg.com, myspace or name your own previous network(s)...

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

This really won't work. I can easily make a blog that pulls all of the articles from these sites and posts them.

BlackNapoleon• 14 years ago

I'm just bewildered here.

We're banning QUALITY content?

BusinessWeek and The Atlantic are some of the BEST and most RELIABLE source of info around.

cpunks2• 14 years ago

The major problem I have with reddit isn't censorship, although that's certainly occasionally there. It's not even the increasing stupidity of the users and the move to the lowest common denominator. It's not the astroturf advertising that pops up every day. What bugs me most is the blatant support and promotion of certain classes of bigotry and hate speech by the owners. Yet I still keep coming back...

mkramlich2• 14 years ago

social media is the new SEO, with all the bad and good that entails

dsolomon• 14 years ago

Reddit, the new Digg

markkat• 14 years ago

This is the biggest caveat with community spaces. Although Redditors can subscribe to subreddits to customize their content, each subreddit remains a community space. IMO there isn't an alternative to heavy moderation when shared spaces are inherit to the design.

mayneack5• 14 years ago

Doesn't appear to be up and running yet:

http://www.reddit.com/r/junk001/

Has recent links to all 4 announced bans.

Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move

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