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Comment by Jerrrry | Hacker News Reader

My only (primary, continuous, and ignored) complaint is that OP's text post's contrast matches the contrast of less-useful comments, making every Self-HN post seem subconsciously and automatically downvoted.

It was "tradition,"? No, it's archaic and ironic for a site with so many A11y/accessibility advocates.

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PG did it in the early days, as far as I can recall. The point was to discourage descriptive posts, preventing it from turning into reddit, and rather encourage posts linking to tech materials.

emphasizing the <a> elements is practically, semantically, and technically easier than de-emphasizing the entire post text node.

I am just now realizing that greyed out text posts weren't downvoted.

I believed the same thing for a while

I agree. The comment section teaches the user to be suspicous of grayed-out comments, but then if we post a text post it's also grayed-out.

I thought the grey color for main post was to discourage us of reading it and to make us: - look only at the shared link when there is some, - or use the reader mode of our web-browser, - or make it harder to read and create a relief when we go back to our source code, ;)

But definitely, I would vote in favor of better contrast for main post.

I emailed them once asking to change that and kind of got a shrug in response. Maybe more emails will convince them?

Another user mentioned the reply basically cited tradition.

@dang, can we ever get a reply to this?

either an excuse or an 0xFF in a .css stylesheet, please?

I also emailed them. Was asked for a minimal change to make it better and I suggested changing adding a class to the <td> to color: #333. This was in August 2021 but it hasn't been changed.

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