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Yes, this is the worst aspect of HN's design in my opinion: the paler font is essentially the equivalent of silencing dissent. What is worse, it is an entirely
by enraged_camel 6y ago
Yes, this is the worst aspect of HN's design in my opinion: the paler font is essentially the equivalent of silencing dissent.
What is worse, it is an entirely silent way of silencing dissent. I would love to experiment with the other end of the spectrum: not only should the number of downvotes be visible, downvoting someone should also require a reason to be given, in the form of a post. And it should be possible to downvote those reasons too, with the algorithm adjusting the original downvote's weight based on the score of the downvote reason.
- zozbot234 6y agoWhat if I told you that you can just click on the comment permlink, and that gets rid of the graying. Nobody's being "silenced" here; it's just a way to quickly assess the level of confidence in a HN comment.
- dlkf 6y agoIs it even a good measure though? Is the community more "confident" in a post that has 1 downvote than a post that has 50 upvotes and 52 downvotes?
- ryandrake 6y agoHN (and many, MANY other sites, including forums, product reviews, search engines) confuses "popularity" with "quality". If there was one thing on the Internet I could fix by waving a magic wand, it would be this idea that more people [liking|linking|upvoting] something means it is better. Crowdsourced curation doesn't work.
- artsyca 6y agoI've been saying that too, 'reason for downvote' or 'link to profile page'