Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains

reddit.com

35 pointstaylorbuley40 comments

Seems a lot of people think Reddit should just "get better" at detecting this sort of stuff, as if effective anti-gaming systems are trivial to implement and will keep out an adaptable foe. If Reddit could wave a magic wand and make all the shady bullcrap vanish, I'm sure they would, but that's an unrealistic scenario.

It looks to me, Reddit simply doesn't want to get involved in a land war in Asia. Trying to tinker with the rewards systems means investing a greater and greater fraction of their resources to fighting opponents who are better-funded and adaptable, in an asymmetric fight that favors the attacker. Even if they could succeed, that comes at an opportunity cost of what they could have done to improve Reddit in ways that actually have an impact, instead of just treading water.

Perma-banning these domains could be the full strategy. The long-term strategy could also just be to negotiate with these domains, with these initial bans acting as the "No really, I'm fucking serious" threat that gives themj real leverage. I would prefer their strategy is the latter, but I wouldn't really blame them for picking the former either.

Reddit presents themselves as a "platform for communities", not as a singular "community" (I'm paraphrasing kn0thing, I believe). This is directly in opposition to that ideal: previously, the administrators have only really interfered with, well, a bunch of subreddits targeted at pedophiles. Now, they're imposing blanket domain bans across every single Reddit community. I don't think that anyone would have a problem with allowing subreddit moderators to ban domains. I'd love to see image and meme hosts banned from almost everything to enforce high quality articles.

The Atlantic is a common sight on TrueReddit. I don't care if it was posted by an employee, because TrueReddit subscribers are pretty good about downvoting anything that doesn't fit. What I do care about is being able to read the great articles from The Atlantic that are upvoted on TrueReddit. However, the Reddit administrators have decided that I, and every other TrueReddit subscriber, shouldn't be allowed to anymore.

This is a fine technological decision, instead of spending years on heuristics, but it's implemented at the wrong level.

I love this decision just for the cold-hearted Keyser Soze game theory of it. It's a classic shoot-the-hostages-first move.

It's not just about these publications, it's about whatever other publications are gonna show up next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, with ever-increasing levels of sophistication in attempting to game reddit. Reddit can fight the threat while it remains small in scope, but they can't fight it if it really gets big.

So they demonstrate a willingness to annihilate their opponents, even if it's quite costly to themselves. If you can do that, pretty soon you won't have any opponents.

The thing is that, according to the DailyDot article that's been posted around here, the account that lead to The Atlantic being banned was posting hundreds of links to The Atlantic and their subsidiaries. What's non-trivial about detecting that?

It becomes non trivial to detect when they start spamming using 100s of aged accounts run through proxies. You can detect that lots of people are submitting stories to the atlantic, but it looks organic.

BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com are all banned sitewide?

The Atlantic is a pretty well-respected publication, as is BusinessWeek. Why a content aggregator would ban actual content is beyond me.

There's a potential issue in that Reddit is owned by Conde, technically a competitor of The Atlantic, but I believe this to be the reason for TA's banning: http://www.dailydot.com/society/atlantic-slaterhearst-jared-...

reddit is not owned by Condé Nast as of September 2011, rather they are both owned by Advance Publications

http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html

Was The Atlantic the site that had a fairly high level employee trying to semi-publicly game Reddit a few months back?

According to this, then that's possible: http://www.dailydot.com/society/atlantic-slaterhearst-jared-...

TheAtlantic pays people to spam the reddit with content, and buys high karma accounts to vote up content. Essentially, the companies being banned are the ones with shady business practices.

So...? I guess I naturally assume that most companies with a marketing department try to get their content popular on social media. Sure some site users may break the ToS by trying to game it...so ban the user. A halfway-decent anti-gaming layer should handle stuff like this without an issue. It seems petty on Reddit's side to me.

A halfway-decent anti-gaming layer just gives these people who have already demonstrably gone out of their way to exploit the system a benchmark they need to beat. And they'll pay to do it.

I hope HN does a similar thing to the domains being spammed here too.

I would assume their 'anti-gaming layer' is perfectly adequate. Admins and employees have stated multiple times that much time and effort goes into making sure that Reddit is run by actual users posting content they want to. This is affirmed by the fact that virtually none of the comments are of the style 'slj2wkvje Said: please review my site: w w w dot myxxxstuff dot c@m'

The automation becomes much less useful when real-live users are the issue. It's easy enough (and probably enjoyable) to spar with the onslaught of link-bots, but paid users (if such users really exist) create a problem which can't be solved programmatically.

If this was happening on HN, the majority of domains would be banned.

When did this start being a "shady business practice"?

This is happening on HN - bostinno.com literally has dozens of accounts, macobserver.com, bgr.com, extremetech.com and a bunch of other sites all have a handful of accounts each. A lot seems to slip through the cracks.

I think you're missing paulhauggis's point - by "if this was happening", he means "if we banned domains that were being submitted by paid marketers". His point is that doing so shouldn't be considered a shady business practice.

It's wrong because employees are getting paid to submit as many links as possible to increase page views.

Here's another bostinno spammer: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dmcgregor

That really is just one of dozens... pg went through and hellbanned a bunch of them a while ago but they've started up again with a handful of accounts already.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3929297

I wonder what their investors think of this.

In which cases are people buying high karma HN accounts and buying upvotes?

I don't think they're buying them yet but it looks a lot like people expect that market to emerge - earlier tonight there was a bunch of mashable stories from accounts that were each 175 days old and each submitting just a generic cross-section of fluff from popular sites.

When was the last time your typical redditor read anything from The Atlantic or Businessweek? On reddit, high-quality content bans itself.

I actually like this decision, as far as I can tell the extent of it.

It absolutely destroys the incentive to game the system, at least most of the current methods of cheating.

It could sparks some interesting offensive spamming of competitor's sites though.

Here's an article that was posted in that Reddit thread that explains what The Atlantic was doing on Reddit:

http://www.dailydot.com/society/atlantic-slaterhearst-jared-...

Thanks for linking to this. Contrary to what the general opinion seems to be in this thread, this was not a matter of reddit banning high-quality content because they didn't want it on the site. It was a matter of them banning an admittedly high-quality domain that nonetheless intentionally broke reddit's submission rules.

Spamming good links doesn't make you any less of a spammer, just a less onerous one.

I'm curious what's actually undesirable about this? After reading that article, it seems like

* An employee of The Atlantic consistently submits their content to Reddit

* Those submissions are genuinely popular with Reddit users

Isn't this beneficial for both The Atlantic and Reddit?

I think the point is that there's no reason The Atlantic should post their own links. If the site is truly popular with Reddit users then some "regular" user will submit the interesting links sooner or later.

I'm not saying I agree with it, or that I think banning the entire domain makes sense, but that's my understanding of it.

This is the fundamental problem with a static point system.

Up/Down votes should be personal and entirely void from the process of agree/disagree. It should be about pushing individuals closer or farther away from your perspective.

I'd like to see something like Reddit that was more like a network. As you "downvote" something or someone you push yourself away from that network. As you upvote something/someone you push yourself closer to that network.

Then again, I also think thread titles should be editable via a wiki and people should be able to submit counterpoints and they should be given equal weight to the original post (not just a comment but right next to the original author's post).

>I'd like to see something like Reddit that was more like a network. As you "downvote" something or someone you push yourself away from that network. As you upvote something/someone you push yourself closer to that network.

If I understand you correctly, you could still game that; it would just take more effort. Instead of selling accounts with high karma, people would sell accounts centered in large clusters of users.

Also, I'm not positive, but I think the system you're describing is computationally prohibitive.

>computationally prohibitive

yup it'd be a nightmare :)

I'm not sure if you could even sell users with large clusters... as the only way to generate a large cluster would be to generate more fake users around that cluster. So you'd have a large cluster of fake users. That or make good content that people cluster around... but then again that isn't gaming the system, just putting content next to people that want it.

>as the only way to generate a large cluster would be to generate more fake users around that cluster.

Oh no, people are very predictable, especially at the median. Getting a reddit account to a high karma score is trivially easy, and getting to the center of a dense cluster in relative networked karma system would be similarly easy.

I suppose it is still possible for their content to make the front page either via indirect self posts, or references by blogs. So I doubt this will be the last I find an article by one of these guys.

To me, i'm more concerned about comment quality. The issue here though is a lot harder, many subreddits (especially /r/politics) suffer from people voting based on agreement rather than quality.

I hope this is a short-term salvo that leads to a better resolution; I enjoy a lot of the writing on The Atlantic, but I seldom go there directly.

I've lost a lot of respect for reddit over this decision. I'm okay with banning users or even IP blocks from posting or voting, but banning entire, legitimate domains because you can't create a valid anti-spam service is going too far.

This is simply extending the IRL justice system into the internet, where the point is mainly to create an incentive against committing crime (banning domains the spam reddit), rather than to directly prevent crime (implementing an effective anti-spam service).

I think any site that "auto-submits" itself to Reddit will be banned. An editor for The Atlantic apparently submitted thousands of stories to Reddit all for The Atlantic articles. Probably automated.

This is already being discussed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108115

The Atlantic?

That's one of the best news sources on the internet. The only thing I could guess there is that The Atlantic /requested/ this.

Science Daily?

Also a fantasic secondary-source for science news.

Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

ScienceDaily may be a very handy secondary source. It may be a great place to browse looking for what's been happening lately in the world of science. But if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily.

(I expect the actual reason why Reddit banned it is some sort of spammy malfeasance, which would be sufficient reason even if it were a first-rate purveyor of entirely original content. But, as it happens, it isn't.)

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