I invite you to read HN with "showdead", you are bound to quickly change your high opinion. The amount of petty flagging and downvotes to suppress diverging opinions is staggering.
If you see a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it, which (when enough users do that) brings it back from the [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch. We added that feature years ago because banned accounts sometimes post good things.
If you see an account whose posts are nearly all [dead] - which means either they're banned or running afoul of our software somehow - and you don't think they deserve that fate, you can always email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look. I've actually been working on a ban review system that will allow us to catch cases where accounts have been making good posts and don't need to be banned anymore. Though in the Dostoevskian underworld of internet dynamics, I have seen several cases of banned accounts which, as soon as they noticed they weren't banned, immediately begin violating the site rules in the most garish way until we ban them...apparently indicating that they prefer that state.
Please make sure you're up on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, though, because if an account has been breaking the site guidelines, you can spare yourself the trouble of emailing—we're just going to point that out as the reason why the account needs to remain banned.
I browse with "showdead", and I find it to be a constant reminder of why such things are necessary. It is rare that I find a shadow-banned chucklehead who isn't an actual chucklehead blow-hard, and when I do I let them know (if possible) that they might want to hit up the moderators. Can't remember the last time I felt it necessary to do that, though.
If you see an account whose posts are nearly all [dead] - which means either they're banned or running afoul of our software somehow - and you don't think they deserve that fate, you can always email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look. I've actually been working on a ban review system that will allow us to catch cases where accounts have been making good posts and don't need to be banned anymore. Though in the Dostoevskian underworld of internet dynamics, I have seen several cases of banned accounts which, as soon as they noticed they weren't banned, immediately begin violating the site rules in the most garish way until we ban them...apparently indicating that they prefer that state.
Please make sure you're up on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, though, because if an account has been breaking the site guidelines, you can spare yourself the trouble of emailing—we're just going to point that out as the reason why the account needs to remain banned.