What strikes me about this thread is the question itself. Twenty years ago we wouldn’t have asked what a deleted account looks like, because account deletion meant the account was gone. Period. Nothing to look at. Now we have this in-between state where the person is gone but the shell of their presence remains, the messages still there in old chats, the username replaced by a placeholder, the avatar a generic silhouette. The internet has invented a new category of presence that is neither alive nor truly absent.
The “Deleted User #0000” pattern is doing real psychological work, I think. It tells you something happened without telling you what, and it does so in a way that’s identical for self-deletion and bans. Discord chose that uniformity for legal reasons (mainly GDPR compliance) but it also has the effect of making the platform feel like a place where people just fade out. No goodbye, no announcement, just a placeholder where someone used to be.
Practical answer to the OP: there’s no visible difference. Philosophical answer: that’s by design, and it changes what it means to leave a digital community.