Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

If you didn't routinely break the site guidelines you'd find it easy enough to participate.

Note that this thread is on the front page.

Seems common here that many interesting discussions are also controversial and therefore result in a lot of downvotes. It’s a pain to read downvoted comments because of the low contrast despite them sometimes being insightful yet unpopular. I also catch myself automatically taking a harsher stance towards grayed out messages before even reading them. I wouldn’t be surprised if many downvotes come in after the initial graying out of a comment, a sort of dogpile based more on herd effects than the content itself. In all, the current voting system doesn’t work well when it comes to controversy. Maybe that’s somewhat appropriate for this community since most tech news isn’t all that controversial. But it’s unfortunate that it’s so damn hard to read unpopular comments on this site. And impossible to reply to them. Are the mods open to changing the grayed-out punishment for downvoted comments to something else?

If you click on a grayed-out comment's timestamp, it should take you to the comment's own page and the text there should be readable.

There's no approach here that doesn't suck. The fading of downvoted comments has downsides, but I think not doing it would have more downsides. It's really important for there to be visual signals of when the community doesn't support something, because in the absence of such signals, people will routinely jump to the conclusion "Hacker News agrees with this". That's not only a non sequitur, it's a category error, but that makes no difference.

Could this not be achieved in some other way that doesn't hurt the readability? Or at least a choice to turn it off or down in settings.

Squinting your eyes, highlighting the text or going to a separate page really breaks the flow of reading.

I actually like this feature. If I want to read a downvoted comment, I just highlight its text with a mouse.

That's easy to do on a desktop, but can be cumbersome on mobile. I guess the problem is biggest on mobile, because of this and issues with glare etectera from sunlight, or low screen intensity at night.

its amazing the audacity you have and the constant lying that is done by the moderation team.

'autodead' comments is clearly a way to stifle voices that don't tow the acceptable narrative.

I've had and seen accounts banned that never violated any guidelines -- once an account was deleted that posted 'generic' comments -- what does that even mean? again lies.

Some commenters get special privileges, are allowed to post 20, 30, 40 times, are allowed to control who is seen and not seen.

but go ahead and pat yourself on the back that this comment above gets to stick around for a few hours, nearly invisible, and pat yourself again that this thread stayed on the front page for a few hours.

Meanwhile, HN purposely removed snowden threads, assange threads, and allowed clearly government astro turfers to control discussions. While voices of reason are auto dead or removed, or flagged into non existence. HN has no clear guidelines, and is run by favoritism and allows token dissent, but not serious real, honest and open discussion.

You are a complusive liar who uses your position of power to stifle dissent. Congratulations on supporting the empire's propaganda.

> Congratulations on supporting the empire's propaganda.

Mate, I think I agree with a lot of the sentiment that you mention here... but you can be more productive in your narrative. This is not reddit nor slashdot; just put some effort.

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