Hacker News does start off many people with a shadowban–I know because I have vouched for many of these initial comments.

When you make a new account and view a thread You post in for the first week to so, gour comments are absent absent unless you are logged in. That’s what a shadow ban is. It can be removed and it happens to every new hn account I’ve ever seen. It gets removed after a week or so. That “inflammatory” post about a game prototype you linked was not visible for even a second in that thread until a week or two had passed