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>the greying of text. It's antisocial and pointless. In my experience, the greying of comments for "computer/programming" topics is usually accurate and lets me save time by skipping them. However, for non-technical topics discussed on HN such as economics, gender sociology, suburban housing, the grey text often is result of a larger group winning(downvoting) an ideological war. Ideally, the top 2 comments should be constructive comments representing opposite positions. However, the popular ideas are often at the top and the contrarian ideas are on the bottom and greyed out. It's not a perfect situation but since I view HN as a resource for technical topics (Techcrunch, Ars Technica, programming, etc) instead of the "soft" topics (NYT, The Atlantic, etc), I'm willing to outsource the disapproval of bad technical comments to the crowd because it has shown to be pretty accurate. I have finite reading time so evaluating every comment on its merits is a step backwards in productivity. The ability for the anonymous crowd to create a quantity of unproductive comments exceeds my capacity to filter every comment that isn't greyed out. For those who oppose grey text, please state your reading budget for discussion forums like HN. That would give me an idea of how you "manage" the signal-to-noise ratio. |
I get that the point is to make it easier to skip over the downvoted text, but greying so far as to make it almost impossible to read is heavy handed, more like censoring then censuring.
Maybe a continuum of first greying (but not too low contrast), then shrinking (but not too small), and finally striking out (for truly terrible stuff) would be better.