By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.
Since I was a teenager, in the vBulletin v3+ forums era, I've wanted to develop an access control / rate limiting system where moderators would be responsible for categorizing posts depending on the contents of the submitted posts and the user who created them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We only use shadowbanning when an account is new and shows signs of spamming, trolling, or serial abuse.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.
That's why we added the vouching feature many years ago: so users can identify and restore the valuable comments made by banned accounts. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
That's why showdead is great! (The checkbox in your profile to unhide flagged and other 'killed' posts.) Not clear on if it unhides IP banned posters though. And I would like to try a forum that let you toggle it by category (IIUC Slashdot has post categories, though it peaked before my time and I don't know if they're used for that).
On the other hand, I'm surprised how profilic certain people are. They get absolutely no feedback, but will go around trolling people several times a day.
If anyone notices an account that is banned that shouldn't be banned, they're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to be banned if they've fixed whatever the original issue was and are abiding by the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).