>i.e. people who are live banned can remain part of the community

But the purpose of "live banning" is to fool a user into believing they're part of the community, while trying to keep them from actually participating through subterfuge. If live banning were simply a way to allow "problematic" users to participate, then the subterfuge wouldn't be necessary, and showdead wouldn't be opt-in, it would be opt-out. Banned users are meant to be ignored and forgotten about by default.

>I've also seen members of the Hacker News community who have benefited from keeping their identity within the community over an extended period of time while continuing to exhibit problematic behaviors.

If you're talking about TempleOS - I would argue that actual banning would be healthier for everyone in his case. He is the ur-example of why "live banning" doesn't really work as intended, or why, at the very least, actual banning should also be an option alongside live banning.

Encouraging him to stay and post while banned is what has turned him into a museum exhibit and mascot for this site, and I think the effect on the community of having to justify this as being, somehow, the best of all possible worlds is toxic.

>From a practical standpoint doing regular banning "right" with formal notification, explanation, and appeals processes requires a non-trivial moderator time and energy.

You want moderators to apply more than the minimum possible amount of time and energy to their duties. But given that there is already an informal appeals process for bans involving someone publicly calling out a banned user and having them email the site, applying that process to a form doesn't seem like much greater effort. Sites with far more traffic and far greater hostility manage with entirely volunteer moderators.

>that means all that energy is wasted on accounts that the owner doesn't value and accounts that the owner values solely as a conduit for argument and/or insult

Of course, that assumption only holds true for some banned accounts, not all. Those obviously deserving accounts could be shown a generic banned message, mentioning it can't be appealed. Or show the generic message and a contact email in all cases.

For other banned accounts, it would be unethical to consider appeals to be a waste of effort because it involves work for the moderators. There is no reason the process has to be unreasonably complicated in any case, as long as a banned user knows they've been banned and has some way of contacting staff to discuss this.

>Regular banning is confrontational.

"live" banning can be confrontational as well, a passive-aggressive, 'slowly poisoning someone's food with arsenic kind' of aggression. Dang now warns people repeatedly before banning them, which is confrontational, but also demonstrably more humane than simply dropping them into the oubliette.

Although, of course, new users may not know what "live-banning" is or when it occurs, they may expect a normal ban. But a user who has been warned repeatedly and then live-banned seems more likely to deserve it than one who's banned without warning.

>Creating a context that threatens identity is unlikely to suddenly produce better behavior in regard to disagreement over a sanction already enforced

Except with live bans, if the sanction is enforced in such a way that the user is unaware of it, the reasons behind it, or the necessity for self-correction, obviously this will not result in a change in behavior. To expect someone's reaction to a ban that they're aware of to be the same as their reaction to one they're unaware of is, I think, unreasonable except in extreme cases.