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Comment by skarz | Hacker News Reader

Wait you actually think that when people are banned they simply just "go away"? Vanish in to thin air? Problem solved?

The way bans on reddit have tended to work is that by dispersing the group, there's an additional barrier created to stop the spread of the idea. This has happened with fatpeoplehate, the trump reddit, and with the red pill reddit among others. Its not just a group of people of a similar knowledge level and similar ideas coming together, it is also new users happening across the subreddit and deciding to take part. Take away the new users and it becomes an echo chamber.

This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.

The only way to deal with it is through splitting these companies up - that's the only constitutional way, and we must start immediately. They're too big.

They're not going to be too big for very long. Their size depends on people being there, and if they keep banning people they'll just get smaller. Once all the interesting people are banned the regular people will go where the interesting people are. They're about to have their blockbuster moment and no bailouts can stop it.

I hope you're right - I truly believe that post 2012 social media has been a cancer on society, in addition to the 24/7 newscycle. But I somehow am not as optimistic as you are. People far underestimate the power of twitter/fb/youtube.

The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.

i dont think banning the trump subreddit dispersed the group

But this approach has diminishing returns. Sure, for the past few years this had the effect of isolating these groups from polite society. But eventually, when they start banning large, main stream groups like, say, people that want to make money in the stock market, people that dislike wall street, and one of two political parties in the USA, all they're going to do is lose market share and therefore their ability to police the internet. People don't use YouTube because they like the logo, people use YouTube because they like the videos on the site. At some point all the cool kids are on other websites, and once the herd follows you've lost control over anything.

I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.

That's pretty much what happened when they studied it, interestingly enough: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

I think that's the opposite of what they said.

Discord is just irc with extra censorship.

No, no one thinks that. What point are you trying to make?

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