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Comment by Leftium | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but I'm curious why some users start a comment with "* * *", then edit it later? Is this just a HN thing?

(Parent comment happened to start as one of these "* * *" comments.)

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Do you mean my comment? I did not write nor remove "* * *".

Oh, interesting! According to HN Replies, that was the content of your comment (https://imgur.com/t5316Rx) (When I checked on HN, it was not "* * *")

I've seen these ephemeral "* * *" comments before, and even another comment asking about them.

That is interesting, perhaps a synchronisation error? As if the actual comment wasn't available yet but the email already got sent.

I don't think it's just an HN Replies email thing. I've seen "* * *" in actual HN comment threads, too.

And I've seen it in 100% of your replies to me, when I've never seen it for other replies. So I wonder if it's related to how you use HN

This is definitely solely an HN Replies thing.

This is the first time I've seen it in my HN Replies, but I have seen "* * *" before on https://news.ycombinator.com/. I even saw another comment asking about this type of comment.

Do you have any HN-related extensions installed?

Edit: I truly did not believe you, but it appears to maybe be the “delay” feature [0]. Users with a delay set might show the asterisks until the delay passes.

My apologies.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024

Reply on news.ycombinator.com