> Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

That's exactly what was done. These publications have employees manipulating social media sites. They're not just submitting stories, they're actively spamming for traffic.

The article says that people who post their own content get banned from Reddit if they cross some ambiguous threshold of self promotion.

I think self promotion shouldn't be frowned upon on Reddit, only when someone manipulates the aggregator.

The reason (I think) is that these places are doing it intentionally from the top down instead of just some random person within their organization or pushing an agenda. If they can successfully identify when domains are coordinating this and make the bans temporary, then this is probably a good discouragement of the abuse. If their detection methods are wrong and they're either banning too many or not enough, then it probably won't.

Several of these well known content producers have been caught spamming and otherwise cheating their way onto the front page. They've been banned for that and not their content.