Bitcoin Forum

Our Official post about it:
http://banksworstfear.com/bitcoin-site-banned-need-decentralized-open-source-reddit
http://banksworstfear.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/SCREEN-Banned-220x162.jpg (http://banksworstfear.com/bitcoin-site-banned-need-decentralized-open-source-reddit/)

------------------------ OLD INFO GATHERED HERE
A few days ago our whole domain was blocked from ALL of Reddit.com -
potentially unrelated was our username was shadowbanned including our WHOLE IP Address.

Evidence: Multiple submissions to different subreddits from multiple users do not show up in the main subreddits

Example 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2fn0rd/traditional_banking_so_damn_annoying/
[Link in r/bitcoin, did not show up in bitcoin reddit. User is NOT shadowbanned]

Example 2: Another user post to r/bitdrop reddit which I AM moderator, submission doesn't appear:

Submission:
http://www.reddit.com/r/BitDrop/comments/2fo9kb/the_bit_drop_details_interview_with_project/

submission not appearing: http://www.reddit.com/r/BitDrop/new/

User not shadowbanned: http://nullprogram.com/am-i-shadowbanned/#tkron31

-----------------------------------
Little over a week ago we broke the Dominica Bit Drop Story which got over 7,000 hits from reddit:
http://banksworstfear.com/entire-population-caribbean-country-dominica-receiving-free-bitcoins-early-2015-let-bit-drop/

Reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2erxuo/breaking_over_70000_residents_of_dominca_getting/

Shadowbanned Status:
http://nullprogram.com/am-i-shadowbanned/#BanksWorstFear

Not good! Did they give any reasoning?

de-centralized reddit next ?

NONE at all.


That's what I just advocated:

https://twitter.com/BanksWorstFear/status/508392078489837568

Were you spamming your website all over Reddit?

What do you mean? No we were not.

We submitted articles to relevant subreddits. one or two per article. In no regards should we be considered spamming as our content was highly relevant to where we posted it.

2,106 link karma
285 comment karma

Our posts were well received. 90% always voted up

Unless someone I don't know was posting. That's just ridiciulous.

Then anyone can go spamming a site they don't like and get them banned. What the hell are upvotes for if they think they need to filter out bad content by banning?

Wow, perfect timing :)

It might be a glitch then, contact support, they can be more helpful than us.

'

Trying again. they have not responded to me as of yet. Emailed a few days ago

There's a reddit alternative:

http://whoaverse.com/v/bitcoin/comments/25261

Gee whiz! I work closely enough with BanksWorstFear that I know for sure that we weren't doing anything that could be considered spamming. Especially not when I try to "space things out" by posting links to unrelated websites too.

It's a shame reddit would do this without any warning, especially to a website that lives 100% off the donations of it's readers (aka no ads on the website). Messing with people's livelihoods for no apparent reason just irks me. What bothers me even more is that banksworstfear has free educational materials, videos, and action items that promote mainstream adoption of bitcoin & other cryptocurrencies. Blocking them is blocking free speech.

Reddit - why did you block banksworstfear.com?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2foefe/banksworstfearcom_banned_on_reddit_for_writing/

Apparently supporting the bitdrop:

re: Site appears to be banned
from Sporkicide[A] via /r/reddit.com/ sent 42 minutes ago
You and your site are banned because you were paying people to post. Due to the nature of the offense, neither you or the site will be unbanned.

Admin: http://www.reddit.com/user/Sporkicide

How do they know that?

Is it true?

This is what I did:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765470

I don't see how this being no directly related to my site means they should ban my site.

And my second question  ???

They do what they want; they run the site. Reddit is discriminatory against content creators!

A lot of the world is, I noticed. Especially when the content creators don't have a lot of money (or Bitcoin) for promotion.

I mean like how did reddit find out what you were doing there on BTCtalk ?

This is speculation, but if the reddit admins have "shadow" accounts then they can check for opportunities of getting paid to post. They can also search the internet, various forums, ect for offers to get paid for posting on reddit.

Wow, I had no idea ?  That is really, really messed up. Does anyone have any write-ups I can read about this?  How is reddit still so popular if people know this?

It Makes sense. I've already started to use an open source reddit alternative
"WhoaVerse": http://whoaverse.com/about

http://whoaverse.com/Graphics/whoaverse_padded.png (http://whoaverse.com)

I thought for sure it was a Reddit clone at first. But I like that it's open-source. I wonder how we can get more Bitcoin users involved in that one.

Is there a r/bitcoin there ? that is how.

yup http://whoaverse.com/v/bitcoin

Well, mystery solved...

Sites usually don't get completely banned from Reddit. Submissions from soft-banned domains end up in the moderation queue and moderators can manually approve them. Most Reddit moderators never approve stuff like this, but /r/Bitcoin mods do. If you submit interesting articles to /r/Bitcoin, they might get approved by the moderators. I'm not sure why that "traditional banking is so annoying" article wasn't approved. Maybe your domain was actually hard-banned, though I've never seen that before. I'll look into it.

I agree that Reddit is often too heavy on banning users and domains. I think that this has a lot to do with the Reddit voting/moderation system just not working very well in general, and so the admins and moderators have to do all kinds of crazy/unfair/heavy-handed things just to make the site halfway usable. We've had to make a few concessions even in /r/Bitcoin, though I think that /r/Bitcoin is still one of the freest large subreddits.

Thanks. Another layer of things I don't know, soft-ban vs hard-ban.

They're acting like government, thinking regulation will stop bad behavior.

Instead of fixing their algorithm; perhaps adding captchas; better deteching 'shill' behavior...they resort to banning.

Yeah in fact someone from bitcoin (a mod?) told me when I was shadowbanned, before I knew, and I already knew about shadowbanning.

Bitcoin as a community can decentralize and open source its own; or switch over to WhoaVerse: http://whoaverse.com/v/bitcoin

What was the name of that decentralized reddit site? Fuck, I forget.

This is rather unfortunate. Seems like they could have sent you a message or a warning. But I also do not understand why you were banned.  I read the whole thread and I am still confused. I love Banksworstfear.com perhaps we should start using whoaverse...

edit: I read your article. Honesty is rarely rewarded. Fuck reddit.

I do not even use reddit, is this site really that important to BTC users and miners, I use this forum for information i need, github for source and coinwars for stats on coins I want to mine. I am a pretty simple person and like to keep things at a minimum.

You wrote "For any user who simply submits a link about the bitdrop to our subreddit I'll give you $0.25 of free bits."

Paying for posting. You're banned. Duh.

http://WhoaVerse.com


The site is still important for bitcoin stories to be broken and spread around. Reddit has very large audience. They got our breaking bit drop story over 7,000 views.

Thanks. DUh


How is that different from changetip operating and Tipping on reddit for posting?

Its pretty close to hypocritical.

Nice..  the one i was thinking of was not whoaverse but i'll take it. How is the moderation work?

Well, it is not.

Reddit keeps rules to the minimum, they try to let users post whatever they like and they have faced consequences because of that.

Reddit rules are pretty simple.

http://www.reddit.com/rules/

"NOT OK: Buying votes or using services to vote."

Pay to post is pretty much the same thing as pay to vote.

I am not a moderator but I do post things over there every now and then so I have a fair idea, It is mostly automated and what the moderators actually mostly do is pull things back that the system has unfairly yanked out.

However, this was not the case in this indecent.  The moderators caught wind of BanksWorstFear offer to pay people to post in a new subreddit;-

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765470.0

They very much frown on that sort of thing.

Neil

http://getaether.net

Worth a shot.

If what the mods thought you were doing it true then banning you was likely the appropriate course of action. They are trying to make the upvotting system as fair as possible to ensure that posts that people actually like will make it to the "top" of the hot (?) list. If the system get manipulated too much then good articles/posts will be hard to find and people will not utilize reddit.

Tips are given to people who make an exceptionally good point/post/idea. It is also generally not given out in mass to anyone that posts/votes in a thread. People generally do not post with the expectation they will receive a tip.

Paying to post is getting someone to post with the expectation they will receive payment. The user will likely have little reason to be posting or even reading the thread if it was not for the expected payment.

Have you used it?

How would people compare it to WhoaVerse and reddit?

no they're not totally simple. There's over three seperate pages of 'rules' as mentioned in my article

Pay to contribute news stories on a specific topic on a very small scale by no means equals paying to vote

As a website owner, I honestly wouldn't give a rats ass if you were "spacing things out" in between your spamming, by posting links to other sites.

If anything that probably set them off even more.  Discussion Forums and places like Reddit are there for people to share thoughts, ideas, and comments.  

You were there to garner business and ultimately money.  Anyone who seems to only post links to a product, service, or website is known as a spammer.  Especially if you're doing it across multiple Reddits.  Even if you're a super nice guy.

A ban was appropriate.

-B-

I have no ads on my website and am not selling anything.

If I were bitcointalk (or BanksWorstFear), I would wear it as a badge of honor. I am not bullshitting.

Reddit, in many ways, is a miscreation. Crowd-sourcing is great when you want to hear a pretty girl sing on TV. But it's really awful in any "social" network.

When I was in school, we were taught, "Majority rule, minority rights." Does reddit represent minority rights? I don't think so. "Majority rule, majority rights" ... Why? Because the majority itself upvoted it, naturally. Do minorities even have rights on reddit? (Obviously not.)

In my opinion, there is a "pearls before swine" aspect to reddit. I actually only found bitcointalk.org when I gave up on reddit completely because I just couldn't stand it anymore, and found myself brimming with indignation. I am much happier having left reddit.

I hope one day you will be too.

[I do not think it appropriate to ban anyone for any reason, ever. Of course they will say "oh, spam!" but that's just the majority putting labels on things again. One man's spam is another man's tofurkey. The same for "troll." If you really look at it, labeling someone a troll is an attempt to dehumanize them so that you can ban them without feeling bad. Goodwin's law aside, if you're to let majority rule WITHOUT minority rights, you're only separated by the Nazi's by 50 years and 5,000 miles.]

Thanks, am proud in some ways of course. It appears the power they have can make or break a new site. This is very worrying.

After researching how many sites have been banned, it is one of those free speech problems but 'its an organization/corporation they can do what they want' yeah; but so many people rely on them to get news around the world. I'm sure they don't want things of potential value to be banned

But yes minority opinions can be sacrificed without much protest.

Lets bring things back into context, your were banned for paying people to post in your subreddit;-

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765470.0

Your making out like your some poor persecuted crypto warrior.

Right. Live by spam, die by spam.

Bingo!

This has nothing to do with free speech, this has to do with paid speech appearing to be the speech of the community. There is a very big difference. Paid speech appearing to be the speech of the community/people is fraud.

Ignorance of the rules is not a defense. Most sites do not like their content being manipulated, which is clearly the intent of paying users to post.

I don't think the OP was ignorant to the rules, I think he thought he would not get caught trying to buy upvotes. IMO the intention of this was to try to increase the value of his domain (he has it listed for sale in the digital goods section)

I wasn't paying anyone to upvote or manipulate a reddit community. I CREATED the subreddit.

The last four commenters don't understand the story.


Imagine you had a study group inside a starbucks and you paid someone on the street a quarter to go in and participate.

Then you get banned for life from starbucks

That's how this is. Completely unreasonable. No warning, over-use of force. Very bad to their reputation for a site that is community and (free) speech driven.

Just because you created it, it does not mean it is yours.  It is Reddit's.


They understand, I suspect you do as well but wont admit it and are playing the sympathy card.


Bullshit analogy.  A better one would be if you went in and set up a coffey machine and started paying people to drink your coffee not theirs.


Thats is not how it is. It's completely reasonable. Too serious for a warning, appropriate use of force. Good for their reputation and yeah FREE not PAID FOR speech.

that's not a good attitude :-\ :-\

If you are paying people to upvote a thread then you are not engaging in free speech, you are engaging in paid speech. You are paying people to agree with you. This certainly contradicts with the spirit of the concept of freedom of speech.

There is/was a listing for your domain in the digital goods section. This is evidence that you were trying to increase the value of your domain by paying for upvotes.

I have not read the TOS of reddit, however I would be very surprised if they did not own the content at least to some degree. 

You're just a fucking hater.

Reddit is a company with a location online at reddit.com - they have many sub locations called subreddits people can create

Starbucks is a company with many physical locations. They allow people to go in and use their internet and, I safely assume, to chat with other people if they so like.

Paying someone a quarter to go inside the location of the business and take up some 'space', and engage in communication; what's the major difference here?

Oh you didn't explain yourself. Your profile doesn't show a website of yours, and neither does your post history

Here are my observations:

This was not the decision of an /r/bitcoin moderator, it happened from the reddit admins.  I think they were looking at their inbound analytics and your bitcointalk post got flagged for soliciting for paid posts.  I'm sorry that happened.  Also I've read that there is a hidden 10% rule that if your link submissions are more than 10% of a given website that you could face a potential banning.  Consider posting your articles here on bitcointalk in the news section, I'm sure you'll get the same potential impressions of high quality traffic - you know, a snippet along with a bottom line and a question to open up discussion, that's what I would try anyway.  I started seeing that overly posting my stuff to reddit was a no-go so I try to limit it to only occurrences where the discussion directly relates to an article I wrote in the past or a product that I happen to currently sell.



Are BTCcointalks threads banned from being shared as links on reddit submissions?

Perhaps you're right but I want to make something perfectly clear;-

What I hate is you saying (and I am paraphrasing) "I did nothing wrong, there was not provocation, there is no explanation, everyone please pity me".

I have no problem with your site, your content or even you in general.  It is just your "woe is me" attitude and refusal to admit you were wrong.

For all we know, it you had gone to them and apologized said something like "Crap, I did wrong, I did not think it through at the time, I promise never to do it again" you may have had your site unbanned.  Instead we have this pity party of a thread where you're making out like some poor persecuted heroic crusader unjustly silenced by "the man".

Hell, even now you could just man up, start a thread here or post on your site taking responsibility for your actions and ask for your account back.  Reddit admins are humans after all, they just might see that you have learnt the errors of your ways and say why not.

Um, I'm reading this here (http://banksworstfear.com/cheap-options-promoting-business-accepts-bitcoin/), and I was enjoying it and then you took it back and threw your feelings of betrayal into that post which was annoying at best and very offputting at worse. 

I want more people to work with me to promote bitcoin at the grass-roots level and I'm hoping that HARO can HAFO (help a frankenmint out)

Take your feelings of funk out of your articles, it's immature - just keep it restricted to that one thread that explains the story/saga of your banning from reddit, imho.  For each additional article that refrences that event diminishes your professionalism, even if just slightly; calling someone a 'fucking hater', in every possible context, is MOST DEFINITELY NOT the right way to move forward in establishing your credibility as a reliable Bitcoin news source.

The difference here is that you were manipulating the space to make it appear to be more successful then it really was. I think a better Starbucks analogy would be that you were hired by a local starbucks to play music inside a starbucks, and you would be paid based on how many people congregate inside the starbucks and listen to your music. You then pay people a little bit to come inside and listen to music they otherwise would not enjoy. A as a result you not only receive a higher payment for your performance but also are more likely to be rehired in the future based on misleading stats.

We have authors on the site. That was their article 100%

Calling someone a hater when they're a hater is the right way to show I'm not a politically correct puppet who just wants to please the public perception. We're all humans here. And did you see the point where he agreed I may be right in my hater label assessment.

We're not aiming to be the best bitcoin news source. Our aim is to end the corrupt banking system. See our name. Compare that to names like "Coin Desk" - "Coin Telegraph" - "Coin Brief"

and NRF, I don't recall saying 'i did nothing wrong' maybe thats a correct assessment. I'm not going to bow down to a site just because I want to have my links posted there, and them blocking me really pissed me and my authors off.

I don't hate you.


Imagine one of you, even if you broke a small rule that barely affects the website whatsoever, were banned on bitcointalk. Your posts look like they post but they're invisible to everyone. You make new accounts but in fact every account made from your whole internet access is automatically blocked and links to your website are hidden on the site.

That's what happened and that's how it sitll is.

I was a big reddit contributor. Multiple subreddits, a lot on the bitcoin subreddit etc.

And just becuase my account names were linked they chose to ban me. I could JUST as easily have had different username asking for what I was doing. I am punished due to my transparency. Like I said, they have greatly ruined the repuation of their site in my eyes and many others.

You previously admitted to posting a lot of your own content to many reddit subforums, posting your own content more than 1/10 times is considered spam on reddit no matter what the content is. The big reason why you got banned though is for paying people to post your articles for you on reddit and upvote your articles, which is against their ToS. Without spam prevention reddit would be pretty useless.

Which thousands of people do  I guess. Maybe reddit is cracking down a lot recently.

The sad thing is; if it was just someone not attached to the website; or just disguise yourself; then its basically under the radar to spout out supposed "Spam" from the same site.

Doesn't their rating system work? People vote for what they like. What more is needed?

"posting your own content more than 1/10 times is considered spam on reddit no matter"

that's not an explicit rule. "a general rule of thumb is 10% or less of your links should be your own site"
http://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

WRONG

Did not pay anyone to post MY articles. Did not pay anyone to upvote my articles either.

Your first sentence was it. But not the revised analogy since I was not getting paid with anything. Yeah reddit wants organic statistics and community driven growth. I came in and oh boy I disrupted their site by 0.0001% - that's not an exaggeration either

with 2 million unique hits a day; and I only got 2 most, maybe only 1 person posting in the subreddit who may or may not have seen this article post to bring them there.

I don't quite agree with your analogy. A better analogy would be to say that Starbucks was paying you to advertise a specific store and would get paid on a per visitor to the store basis; you would pay people to go to the store and only take up space and not make any kind of purchase. Not only would Starbucks be harmed because of this (they would be paying for your services that are not truly delivering) but also taking away from the experience from their actual customers (less resources available to the paying customers).

I wrote that article. Really my addition of that paragraph me using this whole issue with Reddit as an example of how tough it can be to find cheap or free options for promoting a website that are actually effective. I have a feeling that we'll find alternatives that actually work, we'll all be a little smarter about handling it, and we'll all be happy again...

Why would it ever be appropriate for a website to receive free advertising? Most websites receive some kind of ad revenue when people visit their site. Therefore free advertising to your site essentially means free money for you.

For sure, admittedly, that was only the 2nd article I read and I was under the impression that it was a one man band which is why I said what I said.

My other job is sweeping dollars down into the sewer

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Inflaci%C3%B3_utan_1946.jpg

You thought I just made up multiple author names to trick those of lesser intelligence than you that we're a crew of writers?

Bingo!

This has nothing to do with free speech, this has to do with paid speech appearing to be the speech of the community. There is a very big difference. Paid speech appearing to be the speech of the community/people is fraud.
[/quote]

Ha. So the Supreme Court just ruled that campaign donations are a form of free speech.

So how big a difference is "very big" now?

I've actually eaten spam. My dad used to like it. It's not very expensive. Apparently, in Samoa spam is hugely popular, due to island GI's.... etc.

So it's still a "free speech" issue, because you can't just go around enforcing your definition of spam. And even if you could, you shouldn't, because eventually they come for you. You may not be bald now, or old... but you will be. And will you want to be at the mercy of the whims of the hive mind which you think is (now) your protection? Safety in numbers? Not for lemmings.

There is a scene in the matrix in which Morpheus cautions Neo that some have become so dependent upon the matrix that they will defend it to their deaths.

And reddit, in my experience, has an element of this. There are people who will absolutely not listen to any point that you make, unless that point is pro-reddit.

What this is, IMO, is a fundamental belief that change comes through majority rule. If I am truly open-minded, and I consider your perspective, your view, and come to understand it, I may find myself of split mind where I am able to understand EVERY other perspective ... and this, to many, is dangerous. How can I condemn you if I understand you? And how can I defend myself without attacking and obliterating my enemy through my  condemnation? Why would I nail someone to a tree (the death penalty) if I didn't believe condemnation was GOOD?

The biggest obstacle to peace is the belief in war. That peace comes FROM war. That's not just reddit, that's humanity. But on reddit, the manifestation is that you can't be liberal, because it becomes an infection of sorts, resulting in disease: spam and trolls. What's a troll? An attempt to dehumanize so that whatever you do will be excusable, so long as you aren't doing it to a human being.

When reddit starts realizing that trolls are people, just like them, I may consider going back. But I left after four years and am much happier now because of it.

This is my last post on the subject by the way. I just wanted to say to BanksWorstFear that you're not alone, no matter how alone you feel, or reddit, or bitcointalk makes you feel.

jj30, I would have guessed these people were more ignorant of reddit and not pro-reddit.

thank you.

The difference is that they were essentially buying votes, which is not allowed. Steps were also taken to make it look like it was not paid speech but rather the community actually liked what they were saying.

The supreme court actually ruled that corporations are not able to use money to campaign for or against particular candidates, only about certain issues, and the OP was essentially paying people to endorse their website. There is a bid difference because corporations would be inclined to support certain issues that would benefit them, while supporting specific candidates could cause the candidate to be influenced by the corporation that gave a large donation

Throw your computer at a cop!!

If I recall correctly you were giving out bitcoins for people to make reddit posts/comments/votes w/e for your sites content.

Reddit rules: You should not vote up only things from your domain or project, or have any other employees or fans do the same
I said "posting your own content more than 1/10 times is considered spam" reddit says "a general rule of thumb is 10% or less of your links should be your own site" essentially same shit. And I'll let you surf to find the source since I know you will......reddit also says, and I'm paraphrasing, "anytime you post content that you directly benefit from, consider yourself on thin ice".

Reddit has NOTHING to do with free speech. They host that content and have the right to allow whatever type of posts they want while filtering the rest. If you want FREE SPEECH create your own website and host it there....just like your doing with banksworstfear.

"You thought I just made up multiple author names to trick those of lesser intelligence than you that we're a crew of writers?"
By a "crew of writers" what you really mean is that you pay others to write articles for you so that you gain brand recognition and revenue without having to create all the articles yourself.


I think banksworstfear is a good website and we need sites like that. I just think you need to stop whining over reddit not allowing your content links over there anymore, move on and keep doing what you're doing. Your acting like some elementary kid that wants everyone to "play fair".

Found another goodie that supports my 10% rule.

"If over 10% of your submissions are your own site/content/affiliate links, you're almost certainly a spammer."

http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3F

Recollection incorrect.

from: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765470
You were paying people for posting links about your bitdrop. I am not sure what the percentages of the pages that were posted from your domain but I would say it would be a lot/most of the posts you paid for.

If you read the next paragraph you will see that it is against the rules to post about your own projects which is exactly what you were doing.

I don't have a bit drop