Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can someone please explain what this reply means? It isn't the first time I've seen "* * *" and I'm wondering what it's significance is?

Odd, maybe it's a quirk of the harmonic app, as I can see a normal comment now. Please ignore my previous reply.

I believe @dang has addressed this before. You see it when someone has configured a "delay" (see the input field at the bottom of your settings page [0]) which is an integer value representing the number of minutes before which your comment is "published" (visible to other users) - it's meant to be a short window of time where you can edit your comment before anyone has seen it. Once the delay has expired, other users will see the comment.

I've personally never observed it, but I use the HN website, which I think just doesn't render the comment during the delay period. IIRC, you'll see the asterisks when viewing comments in alternative clients that fetch them from the API.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user

Thank you very much for the explanation, that makes sense.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, on my screen it's a normal comment lamenting that the quality of reddit will continue to decline after they IPO

First (step?) of the IPO filing happened back in 2020 if I remember correctly, but they backed out as they didn't think they & the market wasn't "good enough yet" or something in that vein.

2020 wasn't "good enough"?! The entire world went into lockdown, that should've been a golden era for them

I remembered wrong, was late 2021: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/reddit-files-us-ipo-2021-...

This was why I decided to delete my account last week.

I no longer trust Reddit. It doesn’t matter what leadership wants, once Reddit is in the hands of public shareholders leadership will have no choice put to continue the squeeze on users. One of the easiest ways to do that is start selling data.