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Comment by Buldak | Hacker News Reader

>It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit".

There are plenty of people who thought that it wouldn't work to that extent, either. They claimed that allowing a subreddit for toxic topic X at least had the benefit of segregating proponents of X; and that if such subreddits were banned their inhabitants would infect the rest of Reddit. But that didn't happen.

I remember when posts from r/FatPeopleHate would regularly make the front page. Then FPH was banned, and you know what, we didn't see it metastasize elsewhere, we just saw many fewer FPH-style posts, which I'd say is a good thing.

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>Then FPH was banned, and you know what, we didn't see it metastasize elsewhere, we just saw many fewer FPH-style posts, which I'd say is a good thing.

But what we DID see, for a while at least, was a lot of people sympathetic to that subreddit arguing in any way they could think of that the ban was either inconsistent, not needed, unfair or wouldn't work. But what do you know, by and large that content kind of just went away.

I'd argue that FPH was by and large a reaction to that whole "Fat Acceptance" fad that also happened to fade away for the most part. Everytime a member of that "movement" got a lot of attention you would see a lot more FPH related posts, likely from people venting their disapproval.

So it wasn't necessarily the ban that got rid of FPH but rather the "Fat Acceptance Movement" losing steam.

FPH is gone because it was banned, and it was banned at a time when it was very active, provoked a massive backlash in the immediate term, and the ban appears in the long run to have had the effect of stopping the activity.

I guess your argument for the decline in activity not coming from the ban, but scaling up and down in relation with the prominence of fat acceptance, would have to be that the ban coincided with fat acceptance losing steam around the same time, which I don't think to be the case. (It's also a way of talking that seems to equivocate on whether the behavior was acceptable, since it can be explained as a response to something else, and I think its unacceptability is important enough that it needs to remain clear in any conversation about it.)

I don't have an obvious way of measuring the relationship one way or other. But the face value version of events, which is just that the ban worked, full stop, requires fewer coincidences.

Well, FPH-style posts were banned across-the-board because they were held to be leaks of privacy-sensitive material, and harrassment. But somehow, /r/fatpeoplestories suddenly got a lot more popular. Also somehow, /r/peopleofwalmart is still up...

(inb4: "found the Walmart shopper"!)

While it didn't happen for the topic of FPH, my subjective experience is that it _did_ happen for racism. I've mostly been subscribed to smaller subreddits for about 5 years, and while the likes of r/European and r/coontown were at their peak, there wasn't the constant stream of insinuations about immigrants or outright racism at the low (and sometimes not so low) end in subreddits like r/Ireland or r/Europe there is now.

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