One drawback to the various forms of invisible bans is that they aren't visible to the rest of the community. The HN "showdead" feature allows the banned comments to be seen, but relatively few people (I assume) use that feature.
One good way for community members to learn what is or isn't acceptable is by example.
Approaches like disemvoweling (and like HN's graying of down-voted comments) have the advantage that the offending post is still available as an example to other members of the community, quite clearly saying "don't be like this".
Another distinction is that disemvoweling is an action taken against comments, not users. Ideally, a user's first offensive post is disemvoweled, but they're allowed to come back and make a second attempt at civil conversation.
Of course, you still need a way to deal with the persistent offenders who refuse to learn from their experiences. For them, banning of whatever flavor seems perfectly reasonable to me.
On http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, where I've seen the most use of disemvoweling (and several discussions of it and other techniques for defending community and rational conversation), disemvoweling of a comment is often followed by a moderator's brief explanation to fellow community members what about the comment was objectionable. There's also often an invitation to the commenter to try alternative approaches to the discussion, or to join in other conversations on the site that might be easier to discuss politely.
One good way for community members to learn what is or isn't acceptable is by example.
Approaches like disemvoweling (and like HN's graying of down-voted comments) have the advantage that the offending post is still available as an example to other members of the community, quite clearly saying "don't be like this".
Another distinction is that disemvoweling is an action taken against comments, not users. Ideally, a user's first offensive post is disemvoweled, but they're allowed to come back and make a second attempt at civil conversation.
Of course, you still need a way to deal with the persistent offenders who refuse to learn from their experiences. For them, banning of whatever flavor seems perfectly reasonable to me.
On http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, where I've seen the most use of disemvoweling (and several discussions of it and other techniques for defending community and rational conversation), disemvoweling of a comment is often followed by a moderator's brief explanation to fellow community members what about the comment was objectionable. There's also often an invitation to the commenter to try alternative approaches to the discussion, or to join in other conversations on the site that might be easier to discuss politely.