Reddit Bans Power Moderator SolInvictus (Ian Miles Cheong) for Paid Promotion

Under the pseudonym SolInvictus, Ian Miles Cheong — then news editor of the gaming site Gameranx and, years before his later prominence as a political commentator on Twitter/X, primarily known as a heavy Reddit user — 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 rather than merely enthusiastic posting: as a moderator of the very subreddits he submitted to, Cheong could ensure his own links were never caught by Reddit's spam filter, neutralizing the main automated check on self-promotion that constrains ordinary users.

The case moved from suspicion to documented corruption when the Boston-based 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. Reporting also tied the promoted destinations to other outlets such as Uproxx in addition to his own Gameranx. The arrangement ran directly against Reddit's self-promotion norms and the foundational principle that moderators should not exploit their access for commercial gain — and it did so with an on-the-record corporate admission, which was rare.

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 — and later records — indicated the accounts had been banned rather than voluntarily deleted. Given the breadth of his moderator footprint across some of the platform's biggest communities, commentators noted that Cheong was likely the most influential Reddit user ever to be hit with a spam ban up to that point.

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, and it surfaced again in later retrospectives — including Slate's 2014 examination of whether Reddit had a structural transparency problem — as a foundational case. It foreshadowed Reddit's eventual explicit rules against accepting payment in exchange for moderation actions and became a recurring touchstone in debates over 'mods for sale,' sponsored-post arrangements, and astroturfing.