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You're using circular reasoning - that the comments are faded because they're bad, and the evidence they're bad is that they're faded.

But, people downvote comments for any number of reasons, and even doing so for mere disagreement is within the acceptable guidelines - and of course for everything, despite the lack of clear context, the effect remains the same.

Yes, I think that was the actual intent of the system. However, bad != disagreeing with the majority. If the up/down vote functionality is to be used to express agreement or disagreement, which is a change from the original philosophy, then the system should change accordingly. angersock's point is that, as it stands now, a faded-out comment may simply be expressing a good but unpopular opinion.

The irony of your comment being faded should not be lost.

It only takes a single person disagreeing with you to fade your comment.

That is also a problem. One downvote later and the comment is immediately biased toward future readers.