[memeCrasher]

I disagree with any conclusions drawn that censorship has solved any kind of problem here.

Let's take the fat people hate subreddit. Okay, you ban every user and the subreddit itself. Some people make new accounts, and a new subreddit about hating fat people, so you ban all those too.

Did that convince anyone that their opinions were wrong? Absolutely not. If anything, convinced them, in their eyes, that they were onto something and had to be silenced.

All it's done is driven people with those bigoted opinions away from Reddit. These people still exist (until we start exterminating them I guess) and will continue to speak their bigotry wherever it is they do end up. All that's really accomplished is just cleaning the website of speech you don't want anyone to see. Kind of like sweeping dust under a rug - still there, can't see it though. Out of sight, out of mind.

Someone else's pest-problem.

[acdha]

You're leaving out a major argument for enforcing general community standards: does being part of a larger group make discovery enough easier to help recruit new members?

In the case of Reddit this argument is especially worth consideration given how common it is for people to promote bigotry with memes & other jokes or selective filtering (remember the guys who only post negative news stories featuring black criminals?). It's very plausible to believe that many users, especially younger ones, hit something like /r/news or /r/funny and end up on a hate subreddit without realizing how far off of the mainstream it is. That seems especially worth studying given the common anecdotal accounts from parents who found their kid managed to start out in a Nintendo forum an end up in pretty dark places.