It's always seemed like the style and design choices of HN heavily demoted the importance of authors, instead focusing on content. Color contrast and font size

It's always seemed like the style and design choices of HN heavily demoted the importance of authors, instead focusing on content. Color contrast and font size in the comments section are surely intentional. dang et al are extremely thoughtful with their moderation and if they wanted it to be different they would have changed it. Clearly they found a system they like. With bubble maintenance techniques like this one, they tend to regress toward a sterile mean, like mixing all the Play-Dohs together to get that universal gray-brown-purple. I personally prefer the splashes of color (sometimes being one myself). On the other hand, such a system would incentivize being a splash of color in nonetheless palatable ways, which may be a good kind of social pressure.