Redditors are collecting the blacklisted sites at a freshly minted subreddit, r/BannedDomains. The list so far includes at least five: BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com,TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost.
Redditors are prevented from submitting links to any of the above sites. Instead, they’re greeted with the following message: “this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.”
There’s a bit of backstory here: Jared Keller, a social media editor for The Atlantic, got banned from Reddit a couple months back after heavy posting of Atlantic links, something the community-oriented network frowns upon, but is very tempting due to the high amount of traffic it drives. But why prevent people from even submitting links from such big sites? Well, a Reddit technical staffer Jason Harvey claims that these actions were taken as an absolute last resort.
UPDATE: The bans are temporary, according to Reddit staffer Erik “hueypriest” Martin. (ht Brian Ries)