more at the linkThe journalist and editor of gaming site Gameranx had for years promoted his content on social news site Reddit, where, under the pseudonym SolInvictus, he served as a volunteer moderator at some of the site’s most trafficked forums.
At some point, redditors learned about Cheong’s surreptitious link-hawking and tipped off the site’s staff in January. Reddit, which sees 35 million unique visitors a month and is the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” banned him about a month later.
However, Reddit staff had another piece of intel on Cheong—something that, up until now, ordinary redditors could only suspect. Cheong wasn’t just promoting his own site’s content on Reddit.
He was a redditor for hire.
Boston-based news site GlobalPost, whose content Cheong frequently submitted to Reddit, confirmed to the Daily Dot last week that it had hired Cheong as a “social media consultant” through its marketing agency.
Reddit prides itself on user-submitted and curated content unsullied by manipulative social media marketers, which is reflected in the site’s strict anti-spam policies and virulent anti-spam culture. Money corrupts Reddit’s egalitarian content-sharing system by tipping the scale slightly towards parties with a vested interest in a submission’s success.
But the proof that a top community member had traded his influence for money shows how Reddit’s content independence is under constant threat from sophisticated marketing agencies and influential users who want to cash-in on their hard work and reputation.
As SolInvictus, Cheong was no ordinary redditor. During his four years at Reddit, he’d taken up moderator positions at some of the site’s largest forums, including r/WTF, r/AskReddit, and r/Politics, each of which boast more than 1 million subscribers. (Since SolInvictus did not create those subreddits, he could only join with an invitation from another member of the moderator team). Redditors loved his submissions, too. He had accumulated nearly 350,000 link karma (a value calculated by subtracting downvotes from total upvotes) on the site.
Cheong isn’t the first person Reddit’s banned for his social media consulting ties, according to Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager. There were “others in Reddit’s early history,” he said. But with the site growing at geometric rates every year, it’s hardly a stretch to call Cheong the most influential community member to ever be banned.
Rick Byrne, GlobalPost’s vice president and director of communications and marketing told the Daily Dot he’s not sure when the company’s marketing agency, Boston-based Antler, first approached Cheong. But it was shortly after GlobalPost noticed traffic surges originating from Reddit. Cheong, in particular, frequently linked to GlobalPost content. Antler soon approached him with a consultancy offer.
“It was our understanding then, and now, that this is a practice followed by many other news organizations looking to increase visibility among social bookmarking sites,” Byrne wrote in an email. “As a consultant, SolInvictus continued to submit GlobalPost content; and through our agency, we would often suggest GlobalPost stories we believed the Reddit community would find interesting.”
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The social industry is serious business.
