> And it turns out that yes, voat and gab.ai are both filled with the utter dregs of society

What does this say about the validity of the questionable study linked here that applauds "deplatforming" and only examines a few short-time consequences? Great success, sending more people from reddit to their own hate platform that will grow and exploit synergies among groups of particularly toxic people.

If you look at the number of upvotes and comments on any given post on voat.co, it's clear that very few people are actually using it. If deplatforming drove >50% of affected users there it would be troubling; my guess is that it's <5% though.

That we can identify potential school shooters, identity terrorists and other bad actors from their network traffic.

If Joe Bloke suddenly starts tunneling a lot of crap to 8chan... might be time for the constable to drop by for tea and persuasion.

You're going to end up with a shit signal to noise ratio for the people who visit the site for the automotive, origami and cooking boards.

Thats really worrying that guilt by association and thoughtceome is still a thing.

Isnt that just a more powerful soft censorship tool?

Thoughtful and intellectual conversations require good moderation, this is hardly a new concept.

> Great success, sending more people from reddit to their own hate platform that will grow and exploit synergies among groups of particularly toxic people.

Fox News seems like a rather good analogue of this. Despite promulgating information and opinions considered false and unacceptable by many, they are quite successful both financially and at exerting political influence. Shaming and shunning them and their viewers only hardens their viewership's belief in the truth of what they say.

By shunting the "basket of deplorables" off to Voat/Gab, we might be inadvertently creating the next Fox News.

The difference being that fox was never marginalized, it's always been mainstream.

Exactly. I don't support voat or gab. I was just describing what happened.

The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Subreddits like these can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.

That sounds perfectly consistent to me. Stuff that doesn't matter gets ignored. Stuff that does gets the attention of staff, who then apply rules.

It also sounds reasonable to me. At small scales, especially with novices, it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience. But once something's of a certain size, it's unlikely to change its character much.

> it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience.

That's not how subreddits work, though, since they require a a name and almost always have mods that shape the content. /r/waterniggas at 300 people is basically the same at 20,000 people. So if the rule is subreddits should not have "nigga" in the title, then all subreddits with that name should be quarantined (or not allow the names to contain that word).

Subreddits don't tend to change topics or "voices" but they can and do worsen in quality. Instead of posts with original concept C being upvoted, posts with content similar to C but not really get upvoted by the more general audience that comes with larger subscribers. I think /r/bonehurtingjuice is a pretty good example. At first it was excellent but now basically any anti-joke (which is different than bone hurting juice jokes) gets upvoted there.

For this specific example, sure. For most things that would make a community bad, I think it's worth giving something a chance to develop. And given finite staff attention, I think the economics of Reddit's business means that they're not going to bother with the small fry.