Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

That's Gonna Hurt The Bottom Line ? TheMittani.com Banned From Reddit

I can tell you from experience, that linking an article to Reddit very much improves the traffic to an article, it very much increases pageviews. Even with the anti-Poetic downvote brigade, and /r/eve mods' attempts to ban various accounts, I still manage decent attraction to my articles. And for the posts that manage more upvotes than the downvote brigade can muster, I manage exemplary attraction.

So, to be banned from Reddit is going to really hurt TheMittani.com (TMdC). I enjoy reading TMdC, so I don't wish them ill-will. I even hope they can somehow rectify the situation. I have no idea if bans like this are permanent or short-term, but if anyone from TMdC can sweet-talk their way out of the ban, I hope they do so.

How did it start? A disgruntled staff writer, knowing that TMdC used an upvote brigade to get their articles ranked onto the front pages of /r/eve, /r/leagueoflegends, /r/worldoftanks, and /r/gaming (among others), decided to report that to the Reddit authorities. Using vote brigades to increase the visibility of posts is expressly forbidden by Reddit's terms of service.

Upvote brigade message of the day. (click for full-size)

The Jabber ping uses a redirection service to link to all of TMdC's posts across all subreddits to which they've been posted. Users are then to start upvoting all articles that they haven't already.

But a Jabber ping is not entirely proof unto itself. It's damning for sure, but the Reddit authorities needed more. So they went digging.

TMdC authors are expected/encouraged to post their articles to Reddit. If you've written an EVE Online article, you post to /r/gaming and /r/eve. If you've written a League of Legends article, you post to /r/leagueoflegends and /r/gaming.

Unfortunately, one of the TMdC authors accidentally posted his articles to a defunct subreddit, /r/eveonline. There are a total of six links on that subreddit, three of them TMdC articles. The three that aren't from TMdC have next to no votes, because they're in a subreddit that nobody reads. The TMdC links all have 30+ votes. Damning proof of malfeasance if there ever was any.

It's curious and odd why TMdC would even bother with vote brigades. They generally have useful and interesting articles. Their articles would probably generate acceptable upvoting all on their own. I can't imagine they would not have generated very good traffic from Reddit without their upvote brigade.

Now that TMdC has been caught out, they've lost a substantial amount of traffic to their site. I'm sure somebody is kicking themselves right now, realizing that brigading wasn't worth the risk. And it was a risk, given how many enemies The Mittani and Goons have, and that TMdC will always be a goon site to some people. Somebody was going to rat them out eventually.

"Didn't want that Reddit anyways." Amirite?
Source: That's Gonna Hurt The Bottom Line ? TheMittani.com Banned From Reddit