Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whymauri 2564 days ago
This is basically what happened when Reddit banned racist subreddits. Everyone cried

"But my free speech!"

"Won't they just polarize even harder?"

"Won't they just operate in the ShAdOwS?"

Except that didn't happen. The people left for Voat, and then Voat died. Banning harmful communities works time-and-time again, and it would work for YouTube if they actually did anything. For every 'guideline update' or press release they do about content moderation, they do basically nothing. The one exception was the sketchy videos with children, but their solution has been pretty heavy-handed and reactionary. I think that's the problem: YouTube has never been pro-active in moderating its platform and it shows.

2 comments

Even more interesting on that article I linked about exactly that: the people who stayed stopped being as racist / hateful towards fat people. They didn't drag their garbage ideas along to the new places they started posting (on reddit). It wouldn't surprise me if some of them even evolved a little and abandoned those views.
Are you talking about 2015? Because I seem to remember something else happening with racists and borderline people polarizing hard in 2015-2016