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Comment by retox | Hacker News Reader

No, but posting while green will usually get your comment downvoted to oblivion, even if you are erudite and contribute to the conversation.

Turn on "show dead comments" and see how many greens are deleted. I screenshot many examples.

View on HN

Is this cause (ie. people downvote greens out of prejudice) or effect (greens are often created to shitpost?

And to concentrate all my meta in one place... Is shadow banning a thing at HN? I thought they just, well, banned you.

They added shadowbanning some time ago and later added a user (the rest of us) ability to vouch for dead posts to revive them. There were reasons at the time they did this that the admins could probably explain better.

OT - new user here, what does green mean? I assumed it was staff/moderators.

It means new user (hence green color).

I just assumed green meant admin or some kind of paying customer.

I'd venture to guess green users could use this ambiguity to play subtle rhetorical tricks on users with a moderate number of points here.

your username will appear green till you get a certain amount of karma/upvotes.

I thought it was based on time.

hmm not sure. My username appeared green till i got 50/100 upvotes. I think that makes sense since the number upvotes on HN usually indicates that the person makes valid comments and is not trolling.

I doubt it's downvotes. Probably cases of the spam/ringvoting detector gone wrong.

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