As I said 4 weeks ago, the reason you see good comments from banned accounts is that people who behave abusively don't do it 100% of the time: https://news.yco

As I said 4 weeks ago, the reason you see good comments from banned accounts is that people who behave abusively don't do it 100% of the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081 If my proposed plan for a new "pending" state for comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523 works out, we'll just unban most of the accounts that were banned for being garden variety idiots or assholes, and their good comments can be promoted individually by other users. Incidentally, when a comment is dead, it's not always because the user is banned. E.g. the comment that seems to have set off anigbrowl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060403 was not killed because the user is banned, but because it was a dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058489 When you see stories that are killed rather than comments, it's usually because they've been submitted by sockpuppet rings. There are quite a lot of those accounts on HN now, and many of them are smart enough to mix a variety of other sites in with the sites they're promoting. Benologist, who helped us catch some of them, has more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6061108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6061108