I still disagree though - I think Reddit probably agreed with you for most of its existence, but evidence indicated that rationality and clear arguments weren't winning, and the virality of these ideas was too potent to be overcome by a few people who were willing to wade into the cesspool. So they drained the cesspool.
I agree with you that, if we could be sure that there would always be enough people to argue against racists, and do so calmly and rationally, then we would be better off not censoring racism, and instead letting the debate play out. But I don't think we live in that world.
We might not, but denying the possibility only guarantees we move further away from it.
It's even darker than that. There is an organized effort to destroy any public forum that is a place of discourse. For the people and organization paying for the bots, troll farms and social media influencers discourse is exactly what they paying to get rid of. Considering that reddit doesn't have any other business model they had to start fighting back.
in this case, user/advertiser metrics
On what grounds do you base your own sense of "rationality and clear argument" as superior to that of the apparent majority of people that you refer to as "the cesspool"?
In my experience, the majority is "I don't have any interest in arguing." Leaving the cesspool to those few who do want to argue.
If you believe that either (a) arguments against such people less clear and rational than the racists' arguments, or (b) such people are actually in the majority, then I believe we disagree on things so fundamental we can't have a constructive debate about Reddit's policies.
You've identified an example where being part of the open conversation led to a woman leaving a hate-driven community.
Other comments point to a scenario where it could be harder for people to find these communities online, as they would have to have significant motivation to find them. I've seen "playbooks" for white nationalist groups where they describe a slow ramping up of ideology that gradually indoctrinates people outside the overton window.
The question is, is the outcome more or less hate crimes if this type of hate speech is deplatformed?
You point to examples in Germany where the effect of deplatforming was negative.
Current forms of media, attention and culture are significantly different.
I'm not sure how to go about this research when each platform simply aims to maintain their own private, profit driven goals?
How do you measure it?
The fundamental fallacy you're making is that you're conflating the act of judgement with the act of sentencing. What a fine world it would be if your justice system were forbidden to sentence people under the expectation that the purpose of a trial were simply to convince the accused to never do it again.
It is irrational to declare that some behavior is 'bad', yet forbid anyone from suffering meaningful consequence for engaging in it.
Rational debate is how you decide which ideas are worth keeping. It is not how you kill the ones that aren't. (You've found that it works sometimes, but you should bet actual counter-actions work far more often.)
“Bullshit” is taking the easy way out by mass-automatic-deplatforming instead of addressing the bad thought head-on.