That is a shockingly bad-faith description. You're banned because you serially abused Hacker News for years, and we gave you a great many warnings before we did that.
> There is little difference between an "rate-limited" account and an "shadow banned" account.
I don't think this is true. I get the "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." if I post too many times in quick succession. If you are rate-limited the posts that you can post will show up as normal. However if you are shadow-banned your posts show up immediately as dead and people can't see them unless they have show-dead enabled. Even to be able to reply to you I have to first click on your post and then click 'vouch'. I guess if you kept approaching the site admin that's why you were shadow-banned, I don't see any point in approaching them unless something terrible is going on, there are too many accounts here and it's not a commercial venture. I don't know what you did but your comment history seems okay but all your comments are showing up dead unless someone clicks 'vouch'. Perhaps if you promised to leave the admins alone? I mean you have more karma than me! Good luck.
At the moment Shanghai (China) is the cities with most sky scrappers in the world.