Reason, a politics and culture magazine published by the libertarian Reason Foundation, is the latest notable publication to have its domain banned by Reddit.
Redditor mike___mc flagged the issue in the r/libertarian subreddit, noting that he was unable to submit links to Reason on Reddit and was instead met with the message: “this domain was banned for spamming/vote cheating.”
In June, Reddit temporarily banned links to The Atlantic, BusinessWeek and others due to alleged vote manipulation. The Atlantic regained access a few weeks later, and other major sites, such as IGN, have since been sanctioned for mass upvoting of links using dummy accounts in order to gain more attention for their content.
Reason is a print and online publication popular with the Reddit’s r/libertarian community. Twenty links to Reason have been posted to the subreddit over the past week. At this time, it’s unclear whether Reason is being accused of link spamming, or whether the ban has to do with vote manipulation.
To circumvent the ban, one enterprising redditor set up the domain reas00n.com, which redirects to equivalent pages on reason.com. For the time being, the redirect seems to work, and in-the-know redditors are able to keep submitting Reason links.
Given Reddit’s track record on site bans, Reason isn’t likely to remain marooned for long.
Reason and Reddit did not return requests for comment by time of publication.
UPDATE: It appears the ban may have something to do with Reason soliciting upvotes on content from it’s own staff, which is against Reddit’s rules.
“We had a couple of people, including myself, who would link to Reason stuff,” Reason.com Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie told Poynter. “We’d sent notes to people on staff saying, ‘We just posted this; vote it up.’ I told [Reddit’s Erik Martin] that we will cease doing that.”
He added that the publication was never trying to game the system; it was just trying to get its content in front an audience that may appreciate it.
Photo by Andie712b/Flickr
