Oh interesting! I'm subscribed to my replies via hnreplies.com, and your replies come through as just `* * *`, and I could swear I've seen it on the actual site before. Like maybe people were reserving their reply slot or something.
Ah, that must be hnreplies behavior. I've never seen that on HN itself.
It could have something to do with me having delay=5 in my profile settings? (This setting makes it so it takes 5 minutes for a comment to show up publicly, in case one wants to reconsider)
FYI, that feature makes the comment completely invisible on pages where it would otherwise show up in the basic HN web interface (no asterisks or anything). But it appears that if I go to the URL comment directly from a non-logged-in browser, it does show the three asterisks. So it looks like hnstatus becomes aware of the new comment (probably just enumerating IDs?), and can see its parent but but can't read the content.
(I edited this comment based on investigation I did while this comment was in its delay period)
I'm seriously confused. What are you referring to?