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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that the designers of HN deliberately designed the interface to be slightly annoying, although I do not have any theories as to why. That is the only explanation I have come up with for several things that are annoying and would be trivial for them to fix.

• The placement of the up/down arrows, as you noted.

• On text submissions, such as "Ask HN" submissions, the submitter's text is greyed out similar to the way down voted comments are greyed out.

• If you want to see dead comments, which are by default completely hidden, you can turn on the "showdead" option. That makes them visible...but they are greyed out so that it is hard to read them.

View on HN

I think they grey out of dead comments is a feature. It lets you read them if you want, but is a huge visual indicator that it isn't worth reading.

They could accomplish this by using some color that is readable, such as red or purple. That would give a huge visual indicator so that you'd know you are dealing with a dead comment.

Remember, people who do not want to read any dead comments will have left "showdead" in its default state of "off", and so won't see these at all. The only people who see dead comments are those who explicitly said they want to see them.

Is that definitely the way it works? I don't think I've ever configured anything on HN and I see dead comments. I also think it's really nice - as grandparent said, it's a very clear indicator that I'm dealing with something I probably want to ignore.

What does "showdead" say in your settings (click on your username in the orange bar to get to settings)? It should be "no" if you have not changed it.

You can test it on the comments on this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213213

There are several dead comments near the bottom that are visible if showdead is "yes", and invisible if it is "no".

Ohh, are 'dead' comments different from ones that have just been downvoted into mostly-grayness? In that case I don't actually see them, I just see undead comments :) thanks for clarifying

If you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it shouldn't be greyed out there.

I think a better way to handle this would be to remove killed comments from the normal thread view altogether, but make them available to anyone ("showdead" or not) by clicking on the comment's timestamp.

How would anyone see the timestamp to click on it?

Display the comment, but replace the text of the comment with [this comment has been flagged].

I almost wrote [this comment has been flagged, click the timestamp to read it], but why encourage people?

Oh I get it. That's actually similar to a change we've been meaning to make, but only for [flagged] comments as opposed to all [dead] ones. I'll think about the latter.

Personally I don't like this idea. If I've chosen to turn on "showdead", why hide dead comments from me? I've explicitly indicated I'd like to see them.

Because if we do it this way, we won't need "showdead" any more: "dead" posts will work naturally no matter what your settings are. There's no reason to have an advanced setting to allow you to click through to a dead comment; everyone should just be able to do it.

It also neatly dodges the problem of deemphasizing toxic posts on threads; the content simply isn't displayed in the thread, but is available in a more readable form just a click away.

It will also do nice things for the formatting of the threads themselves (flagged comments on nested threads won't take up much vertical space).

But I do not want it hidden, I do not want to have to click through to it. I want to see it, as my selected preference indicates.

Then they can keep the "showdead" option, make it behave like it does now, and the whole site will still get more intuitive for people who don't know about "showdead", to the point where 'dang will never have to explain it again.

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