HACKER Q&A
📣 Siira

Why does HN lower the contrast of downvoted comments?


This makes it really hard to read the said comment, and makes me have an urge to skip the eye-straining comments. A simple downvote count or a red circle that gets more opaque can convey the same information, without making the comments hard to read.

PS: The top level posts in Tell HN and Ask HN have lower contrasts, too. Why's that?

PPS: HN should really have a way to enlarge the site with wrapping. Not everyone's eyes are 20/20, and not everyone is using big screens.

  👤 detaro Accepted Answer ✓
> makes me have an urge to skip the eye-straining comments.

That's the point of it I think.

> The top level posts in Tell HN and Ask HN have lower contrasts, too. Why's that?

Similar reasoning as far as I know: HN should be primarily used for link submissions, so they make text posts less nice to use. (They also get a ranking penalty applied, and URLs don't get autolinked)

> HN should really have a way to enlarge the site with wrapping. Not everyone's eyes are 20/20, and not everyone is using big screens.

I personally use the browser zoom at 120 % on some machines. Although I guess that's not an option on mobile, where browsers somehow don't have that the same way. But HN is generally not that mobile friendly ...

As always, if you want authoritative answers, email the mods to ask.

👤 yesenadam
Use this bookmarklet to see all greyed out comments on a page as black again:

javascript:(function(){var i,x=document.querySelectorAll(".commtext");for (i=0;ip.s. No, I don't think red circles or having to read downvote counts constantly would be better. I think it's better than silently removing comments - you can still read them if you really want. But 99.9% of whited out comments aren't very soul-embiggening.

Re your other comment, there seem to have been many discussions of everything in the past.

👤 DoreenMichele
FWIW, if you click on the direct link to the comment, it shows up as black again in its own screen.