Agreed as well. It's annoying because they think they're deprecating downvoted comments by fading them out when they're actually calling more attention to them by requiring the reader to invest more effort to read them.

It's reminiscent of the infamous "disemvoweling" strategy used on a few other forums, where the reader is forced to decide whether they want to painstakingly reconstruct offensive and abusive comments or blindly trust someone else to restrict what they see.

Life would be so much easier if they just displayed the comment score like most other moderated forums and let the reader decide the merits of the comments based on visible information.