Eventually you will grow and you will need to start making things bannable.
What you also need to have is a probation system where you can't post for anywhere from 4 hours to a month depending on what you do. That acts as a warning. Get put on probation too many times and you're banned.
That's how it works at Something Awful, and they still have pretty good quality after almost 10 years. And they are for-profit.
Also, it might be desirable to extra strict during certain times when people are likely to go berzerk and act really stupid (the SA moderators call this the "banhammer" and make a sticky thread notifying users when it is in effect -- what would normally be a warning becomes a ban).
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Eventually you will grow and you will need to start making things bannable.
What you also need to have is a probation system where you can't post for anywhere from 4 hours to a month depending on what you do. That acts as a warning. Get put on probation too many times and you're banned.
That's how it works at Something Awful, and they still have pretty good quality after almost 10 years. And they are for-profit.
Also, it might be desirable to extra strict during certain times when people are likely to go berzerk and act really stupid (the SA moderators call this the "banhammer" and make a sticky thread notifying users when it is in effect -- what would normally be a warning becomes a ban).
No, S.A. is a pay site, it's some trouble to get yourself a new credit card, but on free sites you just make a new alias.
Although that's true, the new account won't have any karma, which actually matters on Hacker News, since it affects whether you can downvote, etc.
So while banning certainly won't have the same effect as on S.A., it can be useful despite how easy it is to create new accounts.