This always has been and always will be about publicity. 8ch started getting mentioned on national television, and there started to be questions directed at cloudflare. Reddit used to happily host discriminatory, violent communities, and only banned them once people started paying attention and companies became afraid to advertise on reddit because of its perceived connections to hate by the public. The message to hate communities is to lay low and not get noticed by the media.
To the downvoters: speech cannot be violent, by definition. Using your own private definition of a word—in this case, violence—without making an explicit disclaimer is inherently deceitful.
Violence does refer to direct physical harm. There's a subset of people, predominantly in the social sciences, that is trying to redefine violence to include things like "economic violence" and "social violence" (e.g. breaking up with an SO you don't like, or not being friends with someone anymore). This is not the average person's understanding of the word, and personally I feel that it drastically washes down the meaning of violence.
If these things constitute violence then lots of violence is completely legal. In fact, you commit violence probably every day when you decide who to be friends with and who not to be friends with, who gets hired, etc.
