
Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move - th0ma5
http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-phsyorg-businessweek/
======
pg
We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications with
well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we just take
away the voting ring members' ability to vote.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I deal with so many folks trying to scam our search engine every day I can't
imagine the hordes at that gate here.

Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the
site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy.

So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has
changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time
we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how
fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the
same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot
cud all day.

~~~
stcredzero
_So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has
changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse._

Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in
development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest
problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude.

This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough
people use it.

In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam
implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is
likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is
entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple
parties are involved.

~~~
yahelc

        Seems like not enough people use it.
    

Well, since this is a tactic that works best if the bad actor never finds out
about it, isn't it possible lots of people do it without ever talking about
it?

Relevant Coding Horror [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-
ban-or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-
hellban.html)

~~~
stcredzero
_isn't it possible lots of people do it without ever talking about it?_

I hope it's the case.

------
citricsquid
The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a
"work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator. reddit used to
be a great site and there are parts of it that still are, but the majority of
the "visible" content (stuff that you don't have to search out) sucks.

The subreddit idea is fantastic but I don't understand why they aren't making
this their focus. A netflix style recommendation system for subreddits would
improve the quality of reddit 10 fold and give it a _chance_ of lasting the
next few years. I'm a fairly typical and regular reddit user and the sort of
spam they're banning rarely (if ever) affects me, I've never seen a link on
the front page and thought "what is this doing here?", focusing on this seems
misguided.

~~~
baq
that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem. the reason for the
lowest common denominator winning is because it _is_ the lowest common
denomitator - it has the biggest ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. the answer
isn't focus, it's moderation: see the great improvement in recent months in
r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the
internet should strive to be, etc. all those success stories have one thing in
common: active, relentless, remorseless moderation. this is something pg
understands well and is also the foundation of hacker news.

re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive
and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.

~~~
lifeisstillgood

      moderation. this is something pg understands well and is   
      also the foundation of hacker news.
    

This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned
sense? I have been here years and not noticed anything other than peer
pressure. I would like to know if I am missing something obvious like
meta.news

~~~
hollerith
>This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned
sense?

I am not sure what you mean by "officially sanctioned", but moderation on HN
is among the most heavy-handed of any site with comments and upvotes and
downvotes comments that I know of. And I tend to believe that that has a lot
to do with its continued high quality.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Do you know how the moderation actually works? I beleive much is auto-modded -
I am seeing dead links but no reasons for them. It would be nice to know.

(Google bot not telling me either)

~~~
throwaway64
This is mostly based on what I've seen personally, and hearsay around the
community, perhaps PG would like to weigh in?

Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions
and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the
"showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned
if their comment karma is too negative.

Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page,
(occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually
incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly
optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super
down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.

These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them
occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Thank you. Kind of assumed we were all nice people. Anyone know if the mods
are employed/ appointed / community members? Presumably a combination.

Just interested, mostly I suspect because stack overflow elections are on us
and they are ultra upfront about it.

Whatever, it seems to be working.

~~~
hollerith
>Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?

Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges
although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.

Also, I sort of got the impression that _only_ founders of YC-backed companies
and YC employees are mods.

ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression
of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same
text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in
fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The
autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.

------
showerst
This is a pretty interesting move, but they really need to make sure the rules
are ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to those willing to learn them.

I work for ForeignPolicy.com, which could loosely be described as a competitor
to the Atlantic. To avoid being spammy/bad community members, we specifically
don't submit all of our pieces to reddit/HN, or even all the ones we think are
relevant (Virtually our whole site would fit, say, /r/worldnews. HN less so,
but occasionally FP stories do rise to the top here). Most major things get
submitted anyway, and often drive a fair bit of traffic.

That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we
get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit
harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads
when possible.

It would be nice if we could get some sort of account that would let us submit
our relevant content, but without any special privileges a la' the publisher
feeds that helped ruin digg.

We _could_ just get people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to
trade off in submitting our stuff, but that still strikes me as too spammy.

I know in the comments thread on reddit Alienth said that this action will
only be taken in cases where they can prove that the sites knowingly offended
[1], but it really worries me that the lines aren't set in stone, and a
competitor could potentially make a very compelling attempt at spamming all of
our links and get us banned.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physorg_is_not_allowed_on_reddit_this_domain_has/c5046xt)

~~~
jerrya
I really like the content of FP and the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, I already have a feedreader, and I don't need to see HN, or
reddit turned into another RSS feed or twitter.

If your stuff is good it will rise to the top.

In the meantime, especially at HN, it crowds out less well known sources and
authors and bloggers.

~~~
cookiecaper
Is there some good reason publishers shouldn't have an API to submit their
stories automatically and then let the votes do their thing? The concepts of
an official content feed and democratic filtration of stories are not mutually
exclusive.

~~~
nooneelse
The initial work-function of someone submitting a link is the first filter for
if something is good/"worth other people looking at". Taking it away means
more stress on the remaining levels of filtering. So if the same things are to
get through the sum of all filters, either the remaining levels will need to
be more robust to compensate for taking away the first filter, or the first
level should just be kept in place.

More abstractly, are there to be no places where people, real humans, can talk
with each other without the advertising machines wedging their obnoxious way
between us uninvited? Surely you can see there is some value in having such
places. If the populous of reddit wants it to be such a place, then spammers
are like someone at a party trying to sell watches to everyone rather than
conversing. The hosts have asked them to cool it or leave. These particular
louts didn't cool it, so the hosts pushed them out the door.

------
tokenadult
As long as the good articles from The Atlantic (and many are quite good) keep
getting posted here by regular participants who respond to other participants,
I suppose it is okay for members of voting rings to lose voting privileges. I
would hate to see whole publications banned just because of the actions of
their paid supporters, when the same publications have willing readers who
like the content of the publications.

~~~
jerrya
"I would hate to see whole publications banned just _because of the actions of
their paid supporters_ ,"

It seems there is a simple solution to this...

~~~
nooneelse
If only there were some way for the publications to stop writing those checks,
or somehow make them contingent on the "supporters" not spamming sites that
don't want to be spammed... but what could it be? </sarcasm>

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Reddit has a horribly broken spam filtering system for comments and links,
which frequently catches legitimate posts, and then people have to ask
subreddit moderators to mark them as "not spam".

Why? Well, moderator abuse. Moderators can mark stories and comments as spam
to get rid of them. But there is always moderator abuse. So the spam filter
has got trained on tons of comments and links that aren't spam.

How would they fix it? Give moderators a means to get rid of bad posts other
than marking them as spam.

~~~
zem
this has been implemented (fairly recently). there are now both "remove spam"
and "remove ham" options, the latter removing a post without using it as
spamfilter input.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah, that's good. I haven't done any reddit moderation in quite a while.

------
diminoten
The single most common complaint on Reddit about Reddit is its lack of
original content. "Repost!" would be the rallying cry of Redditors, if ever
there was one. This move takes those people who _do_ create original content,
and throws them out on their collective asses.

Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those
who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of
anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

~~~
dangrossman
> Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those
> who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of
> anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

That's exactly what was done. These publications have employees manipulating
social media sites. They're not just submitting stories, they're actively
spamming for traffic.

~~~
diminoten
The article says that people who post their own content get banned from Reddit
if they cross some ambiguous threshold of self promotion.

I think self promotion shouldn't be frowned upon on Reddit, only when someone
manipulates the aggregator.

------
danso
Isn't this heavy-handed banning approach pretty much a tacit admission that
the voting algorithm is broken? Why couldn't this spamming be prevented
through pattern algorithms/frequency analysis and...this is what I __thought
__Reddit aspired to...democracy? If a lot of articles from a source are voted
up by a diverse group of users, then maybe it's because the source is good?

The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad
hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally
benefits...as long as the content is good?

~~~
freshhawk
> The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad
> hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally
> benefits...as long as the content is good?

Well, the easiest answer to that is that one of the best ways to separate the
good content from the bad algorithmically is to look at the submitter
behavior. Saying "as long as the content is good" glosses over the
practicalities of actually measuring that.

------
albertsun
People realize that most professional news publications now have social media
editors or social media teams whose job it is to make that publications
content popular on social media sites and in online communities right?

Seems like Jared Keller was doing exactly his job description and got the
whole domain banned.

------
dalke
Yay! I've gotten annoyed at seeing the links in HN to theatlantic.com and
others, posted by people who _only_ post dozens of links to a single domain,
and who never respond to comments in the thread.

~~~
sp332
That was odd to me, because even people at The Atlantic know that doesn't work
here. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285156>

~~~
dalke
Just for reference, here's Alex Madrigal's submission list:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alexismadrigal> . Self-posts links
to theatlantic every week or more.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nbj914> posts links to
"outsideonline.com"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jnickhughes> posts links (almost)
only to soentrepreneurial.com.

I've seen others, but these were the easiest to find.

------
diogenescynic
Seems like a purely anti-competitive move considering that Reddit is owned by
Conde Nast and most of those sites blocked are direct competitors to Conde
Naste's publications. Conflict of interest.

~~~
mertd
I don't know if this changes anything but I think recently they moved up in
the pecking order to be sister companies with CN.

However banning competitors outright vs banning competitors that spam are two
different things.

~~~
creativityland
But when and where do you draw the line?

Here's the top comment from reddit...

 _Not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand if they were cheating then
blocking them makes sense, on the other hand, I don't see a public list, and
this could be abused by admins to block unfavorable sources (maybe not the
current admins, but who knows what batch of admins we'll get in the future?)_

------
joshu
The Atlantic shows up WAY more often on HN than I think is likely, as well. I
think on the New page, the user's top domains ought to be shown...

------
antonioevans
I tend to post to reddit from my website once every few weeks when the article
is specifically good and "redditable". I would hope that is not a potential
ban target.

What probably is happening is that theatlantic / businessweek had a group of
up voters that they paid (staff) that would constantly manipulate the voting.

------
naner
The first thing that came to mind was that anybody might be able to get
_someone else's_ site banned from Reddit by making it look like they are
trying to spam/game the site.

------
fpp
Content is the most important if you want to create a sustainable sharing
based model.

But, generally with reddit since quite some time the frequency of which the
content is repeating is shortening substantially: Try for yourself - have a
look at imgur and point out the images that you have not seen during the last
24/36 months repeating over and over ( not counting the variations of cat
pics, funny heads etc)

So that is their mainstream - but there are many other still functional areas
underneath.

Now if we are talking mainstream that's where this ban of BusinessWeek.com,
Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost comes into play.

When an organisation like reddit that is facing a more and more immanent lack
of content bans content - well looking at that as a desperate move might be
kind.

In other words - they have lost the understanding of their own business model
or more precisely the underlying principle of their overall existence -
sharing content.

So if those sites are the ones who share the most content - fine - IMHO at
least most of them are known to have created value content for many years
(some for decades and beyond).

The whole thing that a shop like reddit might achieve with that is pushing
more and more of their long time supporters to the sites where the most of its
content originates from.

Or in other words - sure wag the dog - or even better - post the whole thing
on AOL, digg.com, myspace or name your own previous network(s)...

------
ojbyrne
I find this kind of fascinating after Digg v4, which basically tried to ban
everyone else but mainstream publications.

------
daenz
It seems that "The Front Page of the Internet" only includes some of the
internet.

------
drivingmenuts
Don't a lot of those companies hire professional astro-turfers to do their
dirty work anyway?

Besides, how hard is it to point to a proxy that forwards to the spam site?

------
cpunks
The major problem I have with reddit isn't censorship, although that's
certainly occasionally there. It's not even the increasing stupidity of the
users and the move to the lowest common denominator. It's not the astroturf
advertising that pops up every day. What bugs me most is the blatant support
and promotion of certain classes of bigotry and hate speech by the owners. Yet
I still keep coming back...

------
BlackNapoleon
I'm just bewildered here.

We're banning QUALITY content?

BusinessWeek and The Atlantic are some of the BEST and most RELIABLE source of
info around.

------
philip1209
I hope they ban link shorteners, too. As I recall, they both violate site
policy and are prominent.

------
baq
this will blow up. hopefully the bans are interim measures and something more
advanced is under development.

------
markkat
This is the biggest caveat with community spaces. Although Redditors can
subscribe to subreddits to customize their content, each subreddit remains a
community space. IMO there isn't an alternative to heavy moderation when
shared spaces are inherit to the design.

------
mayneack
Doesn't appear to be up and running yet:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/junk001/>

Has recent links to all 4 announced bans.

------
mayneack
Do mirrors still work? Like posting the google cache instead of the original
article.

~~~
citricsquid
Yes, all the block does is check if the domain matches a domain that is
blocked, nothing more. Using a redirect domain will get around the block, the
changes are here on github:
[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/44ebdeb378f4bf09d6bd...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/44ebdeb378f4bf09d6bd1f395764868b57d9fd82)

------
lhnn
If Reddit wanted to end karma whoring in general (to an extent), they'd move
to a slashdot system where numbers are hidden, and only vague ranges (bad,
new, good, excellent) are given.

It wouldn't completely rid the site of the bigger voting rings, but it would
cut back on many individuals who spam posts looking for a quick turnaround.

------
heretohelp
I actually know that Cheong fellow and have visited him and his family in
Asia.

I know exactly what sort of work he does, and frankly, I'm not sure what he
did wrong.

~~~
yolesaber
Ian Cheong?

~~~
heretohelp
Aye.

~~~
yolesaber
That's really quite funny. I used to hang out on the #fallout IRC channel with
him years back. I remember just when he started doing all the gaming sites.
Interesting fellow.

Just for fun: <http://www.duckandcover.cx/content.php?id=111>

------
paulhauggis
This really won't work. I can easily make a blog that pulls all of the
articles from these sites and posts them.

------
mkramlich
social media is the new SEO, with all the bad and good that entails

------
dsolomon
Reddit, the new Digg

------
spindritf
This is crazy, Phys.org may be a little spammy but it's one of the best sites
on the Internet. It constantly pops up in my Twitter feed and rarely
disappoints.

~~~
sente
I'm glad phys.org and science daily are banned, I think /r/science and other
subreddits will be better without them. They're both interesting sites, yes,
but they blast out articles about X Y or Z if a scientist somewhere finds a b
or c.

