From one forum or IRC channel, sure. But you could spin up another, there were plenty. You couldn't get banned "from email" - maybe from one email host if you really pissed off the guy at one ISP, but that would only be a tiny fraction of the people you wanted to email.
Spinning up another HN or Twitter is hard because the web is a lot more centralised these days. Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding, I saw it happen and even did it myself once or twice.
> Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding
Yes I agree. It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
> It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
The point is it's now quite easy to get banned from the whole platform. Whereas in the old days it was pretty hard to get banned from a whole IRC network (it would happen if you were DDoSing the network or insulting an ircop directly, but never just because you said the wrong thing in your own channels, and worst case even the IRC networks were less centralised than today's social networks) and virtually impossible to get banned from the whole web to the point that you couldn't make a new web forum.
You also can spin up another social network, it doesn't work well the same way it didn't work very well spinning up another irc channel or server. And spinning up another HN doesn't work as well.