[mlyle]

I think that maybe, if you ban really early, you can interrupt some of the badness--- but this is also the time it's hardest to justify quelling speech.

But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).

It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.

e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.

I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?

Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.