About one month ago, reddit threw down the banhammer on a few prominent websites that were caught spamming the pseudo social network with their own links, including The Atlantic, Businessweek, PhysOrg, ScienceDaily, and GlobalPost. Initially, the reddit bans were only being thrown at URL shorteners, but after discovering a social media editor for The Atlantic was dumping content onto reddit at a great volume, the bans were then moved to a select group of sites found doing the same. It has probably been a long month for The Atlantic, but reddit has now lifted the ban.
It’s important to note that these initial bans weren’t the result of the actual content being dumped to the social site, but the result of the behavior of dumping said content. Though there’s something of a pretty fine line between an employee of a site dumping its content to any social site, and one who isn’t an employee doing the same, there are most likely going to be some links that don’t get dumped when left up to non-employee readers naturally enjoying a piece of content and wanting to share it, thus preventing spam.
Some of the banned sites had the ban lifted rather quickly, such as Businessweek’s two day ban and Discovery News’ three day hiatus. When reddit enacted the bans, they did say they were only temporary, so it’s no real surprise some of them have been lifted. Though it took The Atlantic roughly one month before their ban was lifted, a few other sites remain under the hammer, such as PhysOrg, ScienceDaily, and GlobalPost, which is actually interesting in that The Atlantic is essentially the reason for the spammer bans in the first place, and it’s now off the hook while other sites aren’t. Reddit general manager Erik Martin explains why that’s possible, telling The Daily Dot, ““when we lift a ban it usually means we have worked with the publisher to ensure that the activity that led to the ban has stopped and measures have been taken to prevent it from happening in the future.” So, if you’re wondering why PhysOrg is still under the hammer but the actual instigator of these bans is not, Martin’s quote, though somewhat vague, seems to have just explained why.
(via The Daily Dot)
- The initial bans
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