[DanBC]

> My comments, for example, have been rearranged to start and stay at the bottom regardless of upvotes since December of last year.

Like you say this isn't a useful signal. There's no way to know which posts caused it to happen, and so no way to know how to avoid it happening again or get back from it now it's happened.

And to say "just make good posts" is hard when you, for example, always include a link to a source or avoid the traditional flame war topics.

> I've seen this kind of treatment enacted on others [...] and the end result is usually the same: They get fed up with the site and leave.

No. People get banned for different reasons, and some people spent a long time behaving poorly, and getting repeated flags and warnings and polite requests to stop, and they did not stop.