The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech [pdf]
This is an A+ study which seems to confirm that banning subreddits can be an effective way to silence their inhabitants. "Fat hatred" as an epidemic has largely disappeared since 2015, for example.<p>It's nice to get some hard data to counter the theory that if you ban a subreddit consisting of undesirables, they'll simply invade other parts of reddit and continue. In reality, the other parts of reddit aren't nearly so tolerant.<p>So what's the implication? Well, ban judiciously. Getting rid of places that fester hatred is like putting out a fire. But it's obviously very tricky to do this.<p>See /r/physicalremoval for an example of a sub that was just banned for inciting violence.