I'm not sure if the same applies here, but I believe Voat had the right idea in banning People only if they'd broken the TOS,and maybe in some other edge cases. Bans in my opinion should be used sparingly, and the boned user should always be notified (no shadow banning).
The users base did a pretty good job in the beginning of using their downvotes to stop any spam (or in certain subs, dissenting opinions), but the beauty of that is it was still available to be seen if someone wanted to. No rows upon rows of [DELETED].
Just wanted to put that out there, would love to hear all your thoughts on this matter.
This is something that has come up before when we've talked about advertising to get more users. The unfortunate consequence of hosting a site with a basis built on free speech is it will attract toxicity. Reddit banned their hate subs to make the site more appealing to advertisers, but I would not be in the least bit surprised to find out that they also had the secondary motive of killing Voat. When the blackout happened, a mixed demographic of users moved to Voat. By banning the hate subs, they dumped all of the users they didn't want anyway onto Voat, and ensured that some of the blackout users who left would come back, due to the hate sub users making Voat shit.
It might be a blessing that we are temporarily restricted by our hosting provider. We have avoided that toxicity for the time being. That, and the fact that we basically cherry picked half of the current users, anyway.