Shadowbanning is reserved for new accounts that show signs of being either serial trolls or spammers. If an account has an established history, we tell them we're banning them and say why (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Of course, a comment being [dead] doesn't always mean it's a bad comment. The software can make mistakes, and banned users sometimes post good things. That's why we have vouching: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch. It lets users rescue [dead] comments that shouldn't be dead.
When a banned account posts a good comment, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be banned. People get banned for the worst things they post, not the best—just as you go to jail for the bad things you do, not the good ones (in a just world, at least). Slowing down in a school zone doesn't mean you get to rob a bank. But if a banned account has truly mended its ways and is following the site guidelines, we're usually happy to unban it.
Why do we do all this? Because we're trying to be a specific kind of website, something quite different than internet default. HN is a site for thoughtful, respectful, curious conversation. I don't know if you've noticed, but the unmoderated anonymous internet doesn't lead to that. Therefore we have to do some things. You can think of it as expending energy to counteract entropy. That involves curation or moderation or, if you like, censorship—pick whatever word expresses how you feel, but the point is that there's no way to achieve the mandate of the forum without various interventions.
If you think you know a way for HN to achieve its goals while intervening less, I'd love to hear about it—it's not as if we want to have to expend all this energy. What we want is an internet forum that remains intellectually interesting and doesn't burn itself to a crisp. That's a hard thing to achieve. Usually people who make grand complaints about censorship, etc., on HN, aren't grappling with the hard problems. They have the luxury of ignoring them; we don't. Usually they also have the habit of indulging themselves in whatever destructive behaviors they feel like, demanding that there not be any consequences, and then complaining loudly (in the name of freedom!) when there are.
By the way, comments like "don't trust closed source software" (if that's all it has to say) are generic, and therefore boring and tedious, and therefore we don't lose anything if they're [dead]. You might want to find a better example. I don't think it's disgraceful to try to optimize for signal/noise ratio—that's a value with broad support in this community.
Only a fool would trust this site. Especially when the mods say stuff like this:
> By the way, comments like "don't trust closed source software" (if that's all it has to say) are generic, and therefore boring and tedious, and therefore we don't lose anything if they're [dead].
It's a fact that you cannot trust this platform due to the lack of transparency in the code, data and moderation, yet they'll tell you to your face it ain't so. Pretty audacious IMO.