Reddit user Unidan, known off of the Internet as biologist Ben Eisenkop, has been shadowbanned from the site due to vote manipulation.

Reddit administrators discovered that Eisenkop maintained five side accounts, which he used to both upvote his own submissions and comments, and downvote opposing comments.

Shadowbanning is a form of banning in which all submissions and comments from a particular user are immediately flagged as spam — making it impossible for users other than the poster to see them.

Considering that before the incident, Unidan had the second highest total comment karma out of all Reddit users, this was kind of a big deal.

Unidan was almost universally loved on the site. Having participated in at least three AMAs, featured in multiple media profiles (including Mashable), occasionally appearing with Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian, giving his own TEDx talk and even having his own fan subreddit, it's safe to say that Unidan was, to Reddit, a stalwart and beloved community member.

Following his ban, many users have expressed disappointment and anger at Eisenkop's clear violation of Reddit's rules.

"This is like finding out Lance Armstrong took steroids," user TheStarryMessenger wrote in a thread. "I really admired his posts."

Unidan himself, under a new username UnidanX, made a statement on Reddit, explaining why he manipulated votes in such a minimal 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."

When Mashable reached out to the company, Reddit's community manager, Alex Angel (cupcake1713 directed us to statement from its blog.

"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."

In an email, Reddit confirmed that the ban was permanent.