It's interesting to put it this way, 'cause a good signature (which I know, were probably in the minority) can sometimes improve signal and reduce noise by automatically including relevant pointers/info in each post so as to avoid repetition of questions/tips/etc.
Or in other words, an unironic version of, "My "Not involved in goofs" shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my shirt," but with signatures.
Those banners were sick, the people who could make them were always so popular lol. I remember doing favors for someone in exchange for a custom banner on a forum I used as a kid dedicated to Line Rider.
They were a borderline necessity on Usenet because there was no protocol linking profiles, just name+email headers. Examples of large ASCII signatures: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/afw/
Not for me, but with how this whole fediverse works I think it would be technically possible to fork Lemmy/kbin/whatever and add that feature and then spin up an instance for yourself where it‘s a thing.
Maybe there even already is a forum with signatures actually which can also see lemmy content, might be worth searching for.
Signatures are absolutely delightful and a part of me misses them too, but I also agree that they decrease the signal to noise ratio on any given page. We want more signal, less noise.
I think it shouldn't be too difficult to make an extension or something that gathers user's descriptions (if filled in) and displays it underneath their posts for people who like that 🤔
Not a big fan personally, but I can see the appeal