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Comment by LMYahooTFY | Hacker News Reader

I find the effects on "invaded" communities post-ban to be most interesting.

There seems to be no indication of any up tick in hate speech within communities that were "invaded" by former subscribers to the banned subreddits.

Similarly, there was a dramatic decrease in hate speech overall among the subscribers of the banned subreddits after the ban.

To draw an un-scientific and unsubstantiated inference, perhaps the power of crowd-psychology and echo chambers is responsible for more hatefulness than we yet can prove.

In some regards I would like to hope this is the case.

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That doesn't mean much. People wear masks, self-censor or adopt more obtuse language. For example despite using a throwaway right now I am still phrasing things not quite as I would like out of concern that I would not be taken seriously.

"hate speech communities" still consist of people. Those people can engage in other hobbies without injecting their political views into everything. Similar how vegans and meat-eaters can dine in the same establishment and atheists and christians can be buried on the same cemeteries.

I would even argue that dedicated places for hatespeech lead to exaggerated expression of mostly reasonable people. Think of trump promising the wall. People cheered him on for that. But that doesn't really mean they want a wall. They might be perfectly happy with stricter immigration policy or enforcement of existing immigration laws too. But shouting "build the wall" is a group ritual for them. Virtue signalling works for both sides.

Edit: After skimming the paper I noticed that the authors were also identifying subreddit-specific lingo. I wouldn't expect this to carry over unmodified to other subreddits. You can still denigrate particular groups without using those particular keywords.

Not to mention this completely ignores the fact that most subreddits have active moderators who remove hate speech.

If a user is forced to discontinue use of a subreddit where it's allowed and continues to use subreddits where it's not allowed, then of course you're not going to see an uptick in hate speech. You've done nothing to change their mind, however.

Reddit also has some absolutely fascist mods. For example, it's well-known that if you post anything that is against illegal immigration (and it gets too many upvotes!) /r/worldnews mods will go through and ban you after the thread dies down.

I was once banned there 48h after a polite discussion on the economic costs (citing various sources) for "hate speech". I got too many upvotes so it was noticed. Appealing to a mod resulted in him "examining my posts on other subs, and given who you voted for the ban will be permanent".

Actual hate speech is one thing, but far-left mods of major subs are using the banner of hate speech to silence well-informed opposing views.

Aside from a small number of general site-wide rules, reddit is based around the idea of "your subreddit (meaning, you're a mod of it), your rules". And nothing about it requires that every single rule be exhaustively defined up-front; moderator discretion is ultimately the sole definition of a subreddit's rules.

If you don't like a subreddit's rules, you're free to create a competing subreddit on the same topic but with different rules, and try to attract people to it.

I moderate a medium-sized (200k-ish subscribers) subreddit, though, so I know how unpopular this idea is with some people.

Is the goal changing someone's mind? Or is it making the site hospitable to more users?

Reddit doesn't care what people think, but it sure seems to care how many people are willing to use the site.

Though the authors clarified that only the hate speech specific to the banned subreddits has disappeared. I think that's still a strong result, but maybe the users might have gone on to spread hate about different topics. (I think that may be unlikely though, since they probably aren't just indiscriminately hateful but focus on a certain topic.)

> Similarly, there was a dramatic decrease in hate speech overall among the subscribers of the banned subreddits after the ban.

It decreases because almost every subreddit bans hate speech.

> To draw an un-scientific and unsubstantiated inference, perhaps the power of crowd-psychology and echo chambers is responsible for more hatefulness than we yet can prove.

Actually it has been shown that censoring and stifling people leads to them become more zealous.

It's especially true if people feel persecuted or marginalized.

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