The Daily Dot

For more than a year, The Atlantic, Businessweek, and PhysOrg have dominated Reddit, boasting multiple top posts everyday and funneling millions of visitors to their sites. So it was a bit of a shock Wednesday when Reddit summarily banned multiple big name domains from the social news site for “spamming” or “cheating”—i.e., organizing voting cliques to artificially push content up.

Reddit took some heat for the decision, on both Reddit and other platforms. Forbes’ Greg Voakes called the move an “abrupt act of censorship.”

Reddit doesn’t usually comment on its spamming decisions and didn’t respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment. The site’s staff have, however, discussed the decision obliquely and even directly on Reddit itself. And over the past 24 hours, a few things have been made clear.

Here’s our summary of what you need to know about Reddit’s Great Spam Purge of 2012.
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