[cantankerous]

Agree with you. HN has been (seems to be) moving away from indicators that can influence upvoting (for example, folks upvoting a comment already substantially upvoted because its upvoted while downvoting dissenting views). Coloring influencers could assign undue heft to persons of a particular color over others and influence conversations in ways orthogonal to the dialogue.

Also I'm told that YC-Alums can see each other's user name on HN as a particular color and non-YC-Alums don't see this. So I guess that's already a thing.