[bravogamma]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Is it also true that users with certain karma count or special permissions have more significant - and potentially lasting - downvoting weight that impacts to the downvoted party's long term reputation?

[dang]

I'm afraid I don't understand your question but here are the basics: HN has downvotes (on comments, not submissions). The ability to downvote requires > 500 karma. When a comment gets downvoted, both its point score and the commenter's karma go down (in most cases - it's more complicated than that but this is the principle). Does that help?

[dredmorbius]

I'm interpreting your question as "are there privileged HN members with supervotes", excluding moderators, and who can single-handedly kill submissions or comments.

So far as I'm aware, no, and there are comments from dang and pg going back through the site history which argue strongly against distinguishing groups of profiles in any way.

The one possible exception is that YC founder's handles appear orange to one another at one point in time (pg discusses this in January 2013: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5025168>). The feature was disabled for performance reasons.

Dang mentions the feature still being active as of a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727636>

I seem to recall a pg or dang discussion where showing this publicly created a social tension on the site, as in, one set of people distinguished from another.

dang discusses the (general lack of) secret superpowers here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767204>, which reiterates what's in the FAQ:

HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

Top-100 karma lands you on the leaderboard: <https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>. That's currently 41,815+ karma. There are also no special privileges here other than occasionally being contacted by someone. (I've had inquiries about dealing with the head-trip of being on the leaderboard, and a couple of requests to boost submissions, which I forward to the moderation team).

[bravogamma]

Thank you, dredmorbius, for this very helpful response. dang has mentioned a procedure or system that involves making guesses for the purpose of shadowbanning. I wonder if downvotes (edit: or post flags) from special users like the ones you mention are used as strong signals in that guess-making?

[dredmorbius]

I don't know about that, but emails to mods count a fair bit.

(I'll occasionally note an egregiously-behaving account that doesn't seem to have been already banned.)