It seems that some people who have had their early comments downmodded (for an unpopular opinion, like not hating Perl) get the rest of their comments auto-killed.  It happened to a friend of mine, who wanted to use HN but has since moved on to other sites, since he can't post anything anyone else can read.  (I browse with showdead on, so I can see the comments, but I can't reply or upvote, so...)<p>It seems like the idea is to encourage the usual social-news-site groupthink, even though pg has publicly stated that he wants to avoid this.  (The spaghetti-code that is news.arc is probably a contributing factor, but I digress...)