Ask HN: Why does HN lower the contrast of downvoted comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does HN lower the contrast of downvoted comments?

5 pointsSiira7 comments

This makes it really hard to read the said comment, and makes me have an urge to skip the eye-straining comments. A simple downvote count or a red circle that gets more opaque can convey the same information, without making the comments hard to read.

PS: The top level posts in Tell HN and Ask HN have lower contrasts, too. Why's that?

PPS: HN should really have a way to enlarge the site with wrapping. Not everyone's eyes are 20/20, and not everyone is using big screens.

View on HN

> makes me have an urge to skip the eye-straining comments.

That's the point of it I think.

> The top level posts in Tell HN and Ask HN have lower contrasts, too. Why's that?

Similar reasoning as far as I know: HN should be primarily used for link submissions, so they make text posts less nice to use. (They also get a ranking penalty applied, and URLs don't get autolinked)

> HN should really have a way to enlarge the site with wrapping. Not everyone's eyes are 20/20, and not everyone is using big screens.

I personally use the browser zoom at 120 % on some machines. Although I guess that's not an option on mobile, where browsers somehow don't have that the same way. But HN is generally not that mobile friendly ...

As always, if you want authoritative answers, email the mods to ask.

> That's the point of it I think.

That's kind of censorship. It encourages groupthink. I really don't like it. Has there not been discussions of it in the past?

Yes it is; yes it does; and yes it has.

AFAIK the official word is that the powers that be believe downvotes on hn “work as intended”.

I have found the opposite. Hn on mobile is more friendly than on desktop.

Use this bookmarklet to see all greyed out comments on a page as black again:

javascript:(function(){var i,x=document.querySelectorAll(".commtext");for (i=0;i<x.length;i++) x[i].className='commtext c00'})();

p.s. No, I don't think red circles or having to read downvote counts constantly would be better. I think it's better than silently removing comments - you can still read them if you really want. But 99.9% of whited out comments aren't very soul-embiggening.

Re your other comment, there seem to have been many discussions of everything in the past.

Thanks! I get fairly surprised by how handy JS bookmarklets can be, like when I was not experienced with Unix scripting. :-) Would you mind taking a look at this [question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61973488/js-bookmarklets...)?

FWIW, if you click on the direct link to the comment, it shows up as black again in its own screen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com