4 ms·

Seems common here that many interesting discussions are also controversial and therefore result in a lot of downvotes. It’s a pain to read downvoted comments be

by jsf01 6y ago

Seems common here that many interesting discussions are also controversial and therefore result in a lot of downvotes. It’s a pain to read downvoted comments because of the low contrast despite them sometimes being insightful yet unpopular. I also catch myself automatically taking a harsher stance towards grayed out messages before even reading them. I wouldn’t be surprised if many downvotes come in after the initial graying out of a comment, a sort of dogpile based more on herd effects than the content itself. In all, the current voting system doesn’t work well when it comes to controversy. Maybe that’s somewhat appropriate for this community since most tech news isn’t all that controversial. But it’s unfortunate that it’s so damn hard to read unpopular comments on this site. And impossible to reply to them. Are the mods open to changing the grayed-out punishment for downvoted comments to something else?

dang 6y ago
If you click on a grayed-out comment's timestamp, it should take you to the comment's own page and the text there should be readable. There's no approach here that doesn't suck. The fading of downvoted comments has downsides, but I think not doing it would have more downsides. It's really important for there to be visual signals of when the community doesn't support something, because in the absence of such signals, people will routinely jump to the conclusion "Hacker News agrees with this". That's not only a non sequitur, it's a category error, but that makes no difference.
- ephemeralism 6y ago
  Could this not be achieved in some other way that doesn't hurt the readability? Or at least a choice to turn it off or down in settings. Squinting your eyes, highlighting the text or going to a separate page really breaks the flow of reading.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    I actually like this feature. If I want to read a downvoted comment, I just highlight its text with a mouse.
    - ephemeralism 6y ago
      That's easy to do on a desktop, but can be cumbersome on mobile. I guess the problem is biggest on mobile, because of this and issues with glare etectera from sunlight, or low screen intensity at night.
deleted 6y ago
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by jsf01 6y ago

dang 6y ago

If you click on a grayed-out comment's timestamp, it should take you to the comment's own page and the text there should be readable. There's no approach here that doesn't suck. The fading of downvoted comments has downsides, but I think not doing it would have more downsides. It's really important for there to be visual signals of when the community doesn't support something, because in the absence of such signals, people will routinely jump to the conclusion "Hacker News agrees with this". That's not only a non sequitur, it's a category error, but that makes no difference.

ephemeralism 6y ago
Could this not be achieved in some other way that doesn't hurt the readability? Or at least a choice to turn it off or down in settings. Squinting your eyes, highlighting the text or going to a separate page really breaks the flow of reading.
- fsflover 6y ago
  I actually like this feature. If I want to read a downvoted comment, I just highlight its text with a mouse.
  - ephemeralism 6y ago
    That's easy to do on a desktop, but can be cumbersome on mobile. I guess the problem is biggest on mobile, because of this and issues with glare etectera from sunlight, or low screen intensity at night.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]