Reddit Bans Power Moderator SolInvictus (Ian Miles Cheong) for Paid Promotion
March–April 2012
In 2012 Reddit banned the account SolInvictus — operated by Ian Miles Cheong — after the Daily Dot reported he used his moderator positions on some of Reddit's largest subreddits to push links from sites that paid him, including GlobalPost, which confirmed it had hired him as a paid 'social media consultant.'
What happened
Under the pseudonym SolInvictus, Ian Miles Cheong — then news editor of the gaming site Gameranx — had installed himself as a moderator on several of Reddit's largest communities, including r/AskReddit, r/Politics, r/WTF and r/TodayILearned, each with more than a million subscribers. According to the Daily Dot's March 2012 report, he 'relentlessly promoted content from Gameranx and other sites.' The core of the abuse was structural: as a moderator of the very subreddits he submitted to, Cheong could ensure his own links were never caught by Reddit's spam filter.
The case moved from suspicion to documented corruption when news outlet GlobalPost confirmed to the Daily Dot, in an April 2012 follow-up, that it had hired Cheong as a paid 'social media consultant' to promote links to its website — an arrangement that ran directly against Reddit's self-promotion norms and the principle that moderators should not exploit their access for commercial gain.
Shortly after the relationship surfaced, both the SolInvictus account and an associated handle vanished from the site. Reddit declined to comment publicly, but the evidence indicated the accounts were banned. The incident is one of the earliest specific, named examples of a high-profile power moderator leveraging moderation control of major subreddits for paid promotion.
Impact
The ban established, with named parties and an on-the-record corporate confirmation, that the financial incentive to compromise moderators was real and that detection depended largely on community self-policing rather than platform enforcement. It became a frequently cited precedent in later debates over 'mods for sale,' sponsored-post arrangements and astroturfing on Reddit, and foreshadowed Reddit's eventual rules against accepting payment in exchange for moderation actions.