Reddit Bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, and PhysOrg — and Digg's 'King of All Social Media'

In June 2012 Reddit took the unprecedented step of banning entire mainstream-publisher domains from the site as part of an anti-spam purge. Links to The Atlantic and Businessweek stopped working, with other bans hitting PhysOrg, GlobalPost, and Discovery News. The move — reported by NBC News as a 'major anti-spam move' and by Forbes as an 'anti-spam crusade' — reflected Reddit's escalating fight against publishers and marketers gaming its front page, at a time when, as the Daily Dot noted, 'Reddit receives more than 35 million unique visitors a month, and digital publishers salivate over even a small piece of the Reddit pie.'

Reddit staffer Jason Harvey defended the severity: 'Before taking such a severe action we make absolutely certain that the domains that would be affected are truly at fault.' The offenses centered on publishers' social-media staff submitting their own links, coordinating votes, and — in the language of Reddit's rules — treating the site as a traffic spigot rather than a community. The bans were described as temporary, and most domains were later restored after the publishers changed their practices, but the episode established that Reddit would punish even marquee journalism brands for manipulation.

The purge also produced collateral damage with a symbolic twist. Andrew Sorcini — once the most influential user on Digg under the handle MrBabyMan, dubbed 'the king of all social media,' and a Disney animator by day — was banned from Reddit, where he had posted as The_REAL_MrBabyMan and 'submitted links to The Atlantic and Boston.com almost exclusively for two years.' The man who had personified power-user curation on Digg, the platform whose 2010 collapse had sent its users flooding into Reddit, was expelled from the successor platform under its anti-manipulation rules.

The June 2012 purge sits at the start of a long arc: the same tension — publishers and marketers exploiting Reddit's traffic, Reddit responding with opaque domain-level punishment — would recur with Quickmeme's 2013 ban for vote manipulation, the paid-moderator scandals, and a decade later the 'parasite SEO' account marketplace of the AI era.