[huhtenberg]

There A LOT of downvoting across all HN threads recently. In every single topic there are comments upon comments that are in gray and barely any actually deserving to be there.

These aggressive downvoting sprees also seem to coincide with that change in HN stewardship from few weeks ago.

[dang]

Your wording suggests that maybe you didn't see sama's announcement about the change we made to count more downvotes [1] or any of my recent comments about it.

People can reasonably differ, of course, but I don't agree that barely any negatively scored comments deserve to be there. I look at all the negatively scored comments, and the vast majority are either not substantive, not civil, or both.

It's true, though, that some substantive, civil comments are getting unfairly faded out. We're asking users to give those a corrective upvote when they see them. This is a longstanding HN practice. It usually only takes one or two corrective votes to get a good comment back to par, so every user can make a difference.

Overall, this experiment appears to have succeeded in addressing the epidemic of highly toxic comments. That was our main goal, because those had increasingly been poisoning HN. That doesn't mean, though, that every other effect has been good. If rallying the community to do more corrective upvoting doesn't turn out to be enough, we'll eventually take other measures.

All: please don't add comments complaining about downvotes, though. It just adds noise.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973

[CamperBob2]

I won't complain about downvotes, but I would like to request a feature. In a manner similar to 'showdead', I'd like to be able to disable graying.

Here's why: when you gray out a comment to the point of illegibility, as is happening more and more, that only makes me want to read it more. So I end up paying more attention to downmodded comments, not less. Somehow, I don't think that's what you were going for.

I would rather have the option to judge comments on their content, and not their color.

[dang]

That's a reasonable request. I've added it to our list.

[Karunamon]

Thank you for at least taking the idea under consideration.

I've more than once wanted to create a browser plugin that basically hides the voting system from the person running it. i.e. all comments are the same color, and top level ones are sorted randomly on the page - there are some hot-button issues where such a feature would be valuable.

[huhtenberg]

> highly toxic comments

I really don't see any of grayed out comments in this thread as toxic, leave alone as highly toxic. There are some lame jokes and one-liners, but they could simply be put at the bottom of the page without a slap on the face that is the gray color. Comment authors can see their negative scores and that's a signal enough for them to mend their ways, don't you think?

[dang]

Oh, I didn't mean that any of the comments in this thread were toxic. I meant that HN had a systemic problem with toxic comments that badly needed addressing, and this downvote change is one of the ways we addressed it.

As for this thread, the faded-out comments I'm currently seeing are not toxic, but they also don't seem like good HN comments (defined as: substantive and civil) to me either. People can reasonably disagree in these cases—that's why we're encouraging the corrective upvote as a community practice.

[icebraining]

There might not actually be an increase - dang said they increased the effect of downvotes recently.