I'll take advantage of this topic to share two 'other side' stories about bans; with a prefatory comment that I pretty much agree with everything mindless1 said and am generally on the side of banning quite nasty people, even agreeing with his caution on permanent bans. It's a chance to blast Amazon again, well-deserved.
Amazon permanently banned me from posting anything on the site - reviews, questions about products. I must have done something pretty terrible, right? No, they did.
They used to have public forums, with many general topics. What they chose to do, and were not honest about - this is a combination of fact and my opinion of what's pretty clear - is create an automated moderation system. The forums unfortunately collected groups of people - we could call them somewhat inaccurately trolls - who would decide there were people whose posts they didn't like, and mass downvote their posts.
How would I know? Besides the comments, when you put up a long post on a topic, submit it, and within a few second before it can even be read, it has multiple downvotes, it's clear. It was more obvious in my forum, politics, but I saw it others like religious discussion also.
Then, the bans started. Suddenly, masses of people were gone. Some made other accounts and discussed what happened. They all received an e-mail (there was one warning, and the second notification was a permanent ban), that was faked to sound like personalized moderation, saying 'after careful review of your posts, we found you posted spiteful content'.
Funny thing. There was zero communication possible with the moderators, no evidence was offered, some of the banned people were clearly not posting 'spiteful' content, and everyone got the exact same letter, making 'spiteful content' memorable.
Now, it's worse than that. Not only was the first ban a permanent ban, it wasn't just for the forums, but all of Amazon.
AND they retroactively removed the product reviews and other content you had previously posted!
That's an insanely anti-customer, abusive, irresponsible moderation policy. Shortly after, they shut down the forums; the bans remained.
In short, another way Amazon is sometimes a horrible company and deserves shunning, despite their other times having very good customer service. Very good or horrible.
Second story about such bans, there's an online game, Overwatch.
It has a lot of toxic players, everyone agrees.
The problem with these moderation issues - which Amazon was dishonest about and Overwatch secretive about - is that 'real' moderation is impractical. Buy Overwatch and you spend $30, that covers the game's development, ovrhead, and unlimited online play. Where would the budget be for them to have people reading messages and listening to voice chat for thousands of games for each player, even just the ones reported (I had to report thousands of toxic player actions).
So they're basically forced into an automated system. But what breaks that system are two things.
First is that players who are so toxic, can abuse the system to report the people who criticize their behavior. That adds up. Toxic players recognize names, and automatically report people. So while the system tends to catch the toxic people who get a lot of reports, it also catches the people toxic players report back. It's a bit more complicated, but not worth getting into the weeds, that's the main issue here.
The second problem is that they could address the first one with a quality appeal system - people who actually review record of messages and voice records - but even appeals aren't very practical - if someone spends thousands of hours, how do you listen to all that voice chat - and they appear to not make even a minimal effort for a quality appeal.
In fact, while they have a multiple step system of increasing bans, players aren't warned when the next ban is permanent, or even told it is permanent when it's done, there's just no end date given.
Their system has an option for 'one appeal', making it clear it's one and then never talk to them again and they won't respond any further - but it says that they will only consider appeals for people who can show their accounts were used without authorization by someone else, not looking at the question of whether the ban was otherwise justified.
And that's that. They have decided, it seems, to throw out the players wrongly banned with the ones rightly banned, and not worry about it. They got your money when you bought the game, it saves them money if you can't play, who cares?
Now, if they'd like to be at all self-righteous about protecting players - it's very easy to not be banned in an approved way: re-buy the game, and you're back in chat, and welcome. Give them more money for the re-purchase, and the door is open. Appeal, that would cost them money.
There's no easy answer, because moderation is costly. Too hard, ban people for wrong reasons with automated systems. Too easy, and toxic behavior is too common. But I think these are two examples where they're worse than they should be.