In a move expected by absolutely nobody, Reddit, the online community that allows users to share links to content they find interesting, has today announced a large scale ban of ten high profile domains due to claims of “abuse”. The affected domains are:

• Phys.org
• TheAtlantic.com
• BusinessWeek.com
• ScienceDaily.com
• GlobalPost.com
• TheAtlanticWire.com
• Funny-On-YouTube.com
• TheAtlanticCities.com
• Echomon.com
• MedicalXPress.com

Read more about the change after the break.

Interesting, many of these sites have been seen around Reddit with little issue for quite a while, and plenty of those are actually very reputable and well respected sites, such as TheAtlantic. The internet is already crying afoul with claims that Reddit is only acting in it’s own anticompetitive self interest. (TheAtlantic, for example, is a competitor of Conde Nast, which owns Reddit.)

Reddit has responded to the outrage with its own very, very short statement:

Some domains are not allowed on any part of reddit because they are spammy, malicious, or involved in cheating shenanigans. Attempting to submit a link to one of these domains will now fail with an informative error message.

We’re initially rolling this out for link shorteners which have long been discouraged on reddit as they conceal the true destination of the link.