One of Reddit’s most popular users has been banned for vote manipulation

The Reddit user Unidan, known affectionately by his fellow redditors as the “excited biologist” and known as biologist Ben Eisenkop in real-life, has been banned from the site due to vote manipulation.

Reddit administrators discovered that Eisenkop maintained five other accounts which he used solely to upvote his own submission and comments while also downvoting those who posted opposing comments.

He wasn’t just banned either, he was shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is form of banning that is meant to completely erase the user by flagging all of their submissions in comments as spam, meaning that nobody but the poster will be able to see them.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, people are shadowbanned all the time, it weren’t for the fact that Unidan had the second highest total comment karma out of all the users on Reddit.

Unidan was also universally loved by his fellow redditors. He had participated in at least three AMAs, was featured in numerous media profiles, giving his own TEDz talk, and even has a fan subreddit dedicated just to him.

Needless to say, Unidan was a stalwart and beloved member of the Reddit community. It’s for this reason that, following his ban, many users have expressed anger and disappointment at Eisenkop’s clear and multiple violations of Reddit’s rules.

Unidan made a statement on Reddit, with the new username UnidanX, which explained why he manipulated votes in such a seemingly unnecessary way.

“Mainly to get submissions out of the new queue, I suppose? Most of the stuff that I did it for was for public engagement type things, nothing for personal profit or anything like that. As for comments, mainly just a lapse in judgement and wanting to bury misinformation, I guess? It would be about 4-5 votes in my favor, at the most. It doesn’t make it right, but that’s the reasoning I had behind it.”

“He was caught using a number of alternate accounts to downvote people he was arguing with, upvote his own submissions and comments, and downvote submissions made around the same time he posted his own so that he got even more of an artificial popularity boost. It was some pretty blatant vote manipulation, which is against our site rules,” said Reddit’s community manager, Alex Angel, in a statement on the site’s blog.

Read more about the story at Motherboard.