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@The_Nybbler too, for good measure.
When you say "sucking up all the oxygen", I think people who were not there might be left with the impression that non-stop debates about whether or not Blacks had lower average IQ at the population level were cluttering up the thread. This would lend credence to the idea that The Truth Was Being Suppressed. The problem for me is that I was there as well, and my memory is that this would be a false impression.
What I recall is that HBD was increasingly being used as a fully-general explanation to any question pertaining to differing outcomes of any sort. The initial arguments over whether Blacks had lower IQ were left far, far behind in a spiral of increasingly absurd extrapolations. The picture that emerged, for me, was a belief that higher IQ was the determining variable in all outcomes, period, end of story. A lot of people appeared to believe IQ was the only variable that could ever conceivably matter, in any situation, ever. It became routine to see completely unsupported just-so stories about how some phenomenon obviously was caused by HBD, complete with speculations about the mechanism involved, without a shred of supporting evidence and to a level of granularity that was frankly absurd. Then there'd be a big debate, often between different "HBD" enthusiasts arguing different but equally ungrounded theories for the purported mechanism, without a shred of actual evidence or even logical rigor visible. And when people grumbled about how absurd this all was, the response was "you're suppressing the science!"
A concrete example from this thread might help: take this comment as an example of the form. The chain of logic seems to be that people who get enslaved have lower IQ, slaves who get sold abroad have lower IQ than slaves retained locally, and that any genetic contributions to ADOS from whites can be safely ignored. The first claim is plausible but unproven, with Greek slaves in Rome being an obvious counterexample. The second claim appears completely unsupported, and the third claim is implicit in the logic but likewise unsupported. None of this meshes at all with the frequently-cited statistics about native africans having sub-70(?) average IQs, to point out only one obvious complication.
Comments like that are neither rigorous, nor evidence based. The fact that American Blacks have lower IQ than American whites is, I think, well-established. The fact that Africans generally have lower IQ is a whole lot less well-established, since Africa hasn't had the thorough population-level scrutiny the US has, but I'd grant it as a reasonable hypothesis based on what evidence has been gathered, and partly on the continent's general dysfunction. "Slaves can be safely assumed to have lower IQ because they got enslaved" is not supported at all, and counter-examples spring readily to mind: the many Greek slaves taken by Rome, for example. "Slaves sold overseas can be safely assumed to have lower IQ" is likewise not supported at all. These are just-so stories.
My memory is that just-so stories like this used to be absolutely rampant, and that this rampancy was what the topic ban aimed to suppress. I think it worked reasonably well, though not without considerable cost. Maybe it have been better to just spot the pattern, trace its outlines, and then point it out whenever it showed; that's the pattern that eventually worked on a number of other emergent or engineered problems in the forum. I contend simply that it was a serious problem, and it deserved to be addressed because it was notably degrading the perceived quality of the forum for a lot of users.
Maybe my memory is wrong, and I'd be open to contrary evidence. I waffled on turning this into a top-level post next week, but eh.
No, I think that's a fair summary, but I'd add that I do recall that there were a lot of posters who just seemed to want to turn every thread into yet another polemic about how all problems in the American culture war go back to blacks and their low IQs.
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