zlacker

A lot of "new people" who show up to complain about HN are not "new people" at all but ones who have been banned many times and are well aware of it. Typically they create a new account to come back in the front door before the back door has swung shut behind them. A favorite sport before doing that is to leave a message with the old account about how $snarkism HN is and how they're leaving and never coming back.

If you or anyone has suggestions for how to better write software to distinguish between genuinely new accounts and serial abusers, I'm sure we'd be very interested.

>>dang+(OP)
Another baby that gets thrown away with the bathwater are new throwaway accounts used to post controversial stuff or to whistle-blow their companies. Unfortunately there's no programmatic way to tell them apart from new accounts made for trolling as you point out.