Well, that user also posted over 60 links in the last year, while never receiving a single upvote or comment. I'm not sure why a flesh-and-blood user would still be posting after that.
"Saved links" might be one reason. While I wouldn't advocate using HN as a personal bookmark service it does lessen the burn a bit if nobody else comments/votes on it. The good thing is that if you use saved links for that it makes you think twice about what sort of things you should be submitting.
Their posting frequency dropped significantly over the past year, probably as a result of never receiving any upvotes. At the time they were (presumably) hellbanned, they were posting at a rough average of one post per day, and it's much less frequent now. They seem to go for a week or two period in which they'll post several links, then forget about HN for a while.
I won't try to defend all of their posts; most of them are things that I don't even find interesting. But it seems that someone basically used banning as a method of cutting down on uninteresting material.
That may even be a good way of maintaining the signal-to-noise ratio on HN: if we ban the users that post many uninteresting links then the community won't have to see them. But it wasn't a tactic that I was aware of before today.
