Massive Scandal – Big Sites Caught Cheating On Reddit, Issue Apologies

Doesn’t matter what website you run, whether it be gaming or any other medium, you need hits. There are aggregate sites that can help you achieve success by sending massive amount of hits to your site by allowing their click out to your articles posted these sites front pages. But getting on the front page of Reddit and Digg is not an easy task, and after employing a really dirty way of getting on Reddit’s main stage, G4TV, VGchartz and Gamepro were caught in the act.

The scandal got so big that the three aforementioned sites had to issue apologies.

The situation was uncovered by a “redditter”, who was concerned about a few “terrible” articles making front page as soon as they were submitted. His query lead him to break the biggest scandal in the aggregate site’s history. Read his findings.

Here’s VGchartz apology:

“Today has been troublesome over at gamrFeed. We looked at Reddit today and saw the story about G4TV, GamePro, and gamrFeed spamming the Gaming Sub-Reddit. G4TV has already stepped forward to explain their story and we thought we should do the same.

A few months ago we started working with a social networking specialist who was well-versed in Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and of course, Reddit. He knew how to use them well and increase our visibility in these communities. We eventually brought him on as a freelance Social Networking expert.
What we didn’t realize was the extent of his involvement with Reddit. We knew he had a few accounts to submit with, but had no idea it was 20 and he was using them all for upvotes and comments.

That said, since we were paying him, we are responsible for his actions in representing us. We are taking complete, 100% responsibility for the egregious actions and spamming done by this individual. We should have been more vigilant. We have already instructed him to no longer submit gamrFeed content on Reddit and no other gamrFeed agents will be submitting our content to Reddit for quite some time.

Again, I apologize on behalf of gamrFeed and the entire VGChartz Network.”

Here’s Gampro’s apology:

“We’ve been following this thread with some alarm. It’s definitely true that we’ve had some power users recently spamming content on our behalf. We have already stepped in and asked those people not to do this in future.

The reality of the situation is pretty straightforward – Reddit can be gamed, it was gamed by people on our behalf, and those people got busted. We take full responsibility for engaging those people. And yes, we’re apologizing because we got busted. Damn you. We’d have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids. So give us the kicking we deserve, and we’ll look forward to seeing what the conspiracy theorists will come up with.

We’re hoping that the more reasonable of you will respect our honesty regarding our deferred dishonesty, but we’re sure some people will run riot with it, which is to be expected – and in some places celebrated – on the Internet. Ultimately, we respect Reddit and its community, at least the ones who don’t live under a bridge and forget to take their meds. We also believe in our content, but in future we want you, not spammers, to be the judge of it.”

Here’s G4TV’s apology:

“Today we logged on to Reddit and saw the story about G4TV, GamePro and VGChartz from Deimorz at the top of the Gaming sub-reddit. Obviously, this was troubling to us, so we decided to explain our involvement in what happened.

Awhile back we discovered a poweruser on Digg submitting and digging our content, which we thought was great. So we started a relationship with him where he’d submit a story here and there and we’d send him random games. This relationship continued on Reddit as it grew in popularity. This was good for us, as we all liked Reddit, but didn’t feel like our content had much exposure on the site. After some time we began to pay him a small amount of money instead of games.

However, we didn’t know the full extent of how he was achieving success on Reddit. We had no idea that he had 20 accounts under his control. We also didn’t know that he was using the other accounts to comment on his own submissions. That’s on us 100%, we should have paid more attention to his methods.

Now, even with this going on, if you check our domain, in the last 14 days, there were only 8 submissions to the Gaming sub-Reddit (although some look they may have been deleted by the mods). It’s probably more than what would have happened organically, but it’s not exactly heavy spam.
In the end, what we want is for Reddit users to be aware of G4tv.com’s content, and know that G4tv.com is a good gaming website with quality reviews, interesting features, and intelligent writers.

It’s why you may have seen us using Reddit’s self-service ad system a few times, including today. We have already told this user to never submit G4 content again, and promise that this won’t happen in the future.
TL;DR – We’re owning up, we were wrong to do this, and we hope you forgive us.”

The guy who was the culprit of all this also had something to say, telling site members that if anyone’s to blame, it would have to be him, and that they should not “hate” those sites because of it”

“Yea, it’s me the guy who pushed links to the hot list and want to announce I won’t be submitting links for those sites for a long time. I think even if I apologize it wouldn’t help the damage I may have caused but still am sorry. Just to let you know not all of them accounts are mine. Spambitch01 I think was just a reddit user that registered just to have fun attacking without using his real account because I don’t know him at all.

Just don’t blame any of the sites, they did nothing wrong. Also, most of the time I never used the accounts to vote on my stuff. Social media users build up IM groups and Facebook groups to get votes quickly and I know a lot of digg/reddit/stumble/ a lot of other sites who do the same. The main reason I have multiple accounts so I’m not posting many of the same links on the same accounts as you can see some of them havent submitted for days. I also only pushed my stuff to about 20-17 and let things go natural. I’m not going to exploit the other sites that push their stuff.

If you like the content give it a vote, don’t downvote it because of this situation. I would go into why I do social media but it’s personal and I don’t like to give out personal information. Btw. As masterofhyrule. I would like to say I didn’t spam digg back then, I just added a bunch of friends to share to to get my videos on the front page but when I saw it hit top 10 I was surprised. I didn’t do the videos for money, I did it to be popular and the reason I was banned from digg back then wasn’t because of spam, it was from the greasemonkey script that 100+ users used. Just wanted to clear that up even thoughts been 3 years about. Feel free to attack me, just please don’t hate the sites, they aren’t the problem.

Thanks for reading. Send your hate now… (btw, I wrote this on my iPod so sorry for any grammar mistakes$”

Massive scandal there. I never thought the bigger sites would employ such a tactic. But then again, who am I kidding?