Stacy Horn's book Cyberville has an interesting discussion about using that approach on ECHO in the late-80s/early-90s as well, though in that case it was also tied up with a very anti-banning ideology (the cyberspace-as-unfettered-discussion idea that was popular in WELL-influenced circles). They experimented with various versions of totally-unrestricted forums, giving people their own forums for weird topics, stronger and weaker on-topic enforcement, etc. In a few cases they seem to have eventually decided to ban people, despite the initial reluctance, because some of the diversion measures just didn't work. Not sure how well it generalizes, but it's an interesting read for the $0.01 price of a used copy.
>a very anti-banning ideology (the cyberspace-as-unfettered-discussion idea that was popular in WELL-influenced circles)
The WELL might have had an anti-banning ideology, but it also had an ideology that everything a person writes must be written "under eir real name", with the dual consequences of much-higher reputational consequences for bad behavior and everyone's realizing that if the administration ever did decide to ban a user, getting around the ban would be a lot more involved than just using Tor, a TCP relay or getting a new IP or email address.
(Unimportant details: The real names of most participants were probably verified when they paid the monthly fee by check or credit card. By "under eir real name" I mean that every post had a Unix user name attached, and there was a policy that every user's ~/.plan file had to contain eir real name.)
True, though one problem is there are a non-zero number of people quite willing to having their real name attached to their conspiracy-theory or racism-mongering stuff. They might even prefer it, because their rl occupation is selling their conspiracy-theory books or otherwise hawking their conspiracy-theory website/organization/etc. It gets rid of the kids trolling for laughs, but you still end up with the hardcore people who are 100% committed to their odd views as a lifestyle, and have to decide what (if anything) to do about them.
