[utucuro]

Visually, the low contrast from downvoting is tiring to the eyes if it's longer than a short sentence or so. As the reader, I do not see why my eyesight should be punished for this purpose. There are some really good decisions in HN, but the visual representation is not one of them.

[DoreenMichele]

If you click on the timestamp, it shows up as black again. I do that often because I have very serious eyesight issues.

[greenyoda]

I get eye strain from looking a bright white pages, so I use a Firefox add-on called "Dark Background and Light Text", which lets me override the foreground and background colors of pages with my choice of colors. As an added bonus, it prevents the annoying graying of comments on HN. (Use the "Simple CSS" option with HN, otherwise the up/down arrows will not display.)

For those who are interested:

Add-on page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...

Github repo: https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-...