This. I've seen some long, serious, insightful [dead] comments which turned out to be from users hellbanned quite a while ago. If they aren't deliberately trolling, tricking them into continually wasting their time this way is a terrible thing to do.
Parking your car so that it blocks the alley is a terrible thing to do. Eating all the skin off a bucket of fried chicken is a terrible thing to do (as is buying a bucket of fried chicken). Serving warm beer is a terrible thing to do.
Failing to welcome the comments, well intentioned or otherwise, of someone who had to be explicitly driven out of a community is not a terrible thing to do.
Not all of those [dead] comments are actually from hellbanned users, are they?
How about, the ones who care enough to put contact info in their profiles, you can reach out to them and say "you may not have noticed but the HN admins seem to have banned you".
I have sent dozens of those emails over the years. It's only a small fraction of the [dead] productive comments I find, but not that many people have contact info or googleable usernames.
