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Comment by SerLava | Hacker News Reader

I've still never figured out why Hacker News gradually turns down the contrast when something gets downvoted. It's the worst possible way to represent it. Absolutely frustrating.

Even though downvoted comments usually are inflammatory, sometimes I want to read the damn thing so that the rebuttals make sense.

And then every Ask HN is low-contrast. Why?

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I personally like the progressive unreadability of downvoted posts, the semantics are perfect. If for some reason I'm curious about what they say (normally triggered by some answer) then I do the mouse select thing to read them.

The Ask HN makes no sense.

I think the semantics are good too, but it is still problematic. And note that selecting doesn’t really enhance contrast on Macs.

The lowered contrast is a screaming invitation to highlight it myself. Making the text deviate from the rest makes it more noticable, and making me work to see what it says forces me to engage with it in a way I don't usually engage with text.

But I think it works. It serves as an advertisement for what sort of talk is discouraged by the community.

The Ask HN thing is so bizarre. For the longest time I thought everyone just hated Ask HNs and so immediately downvoted them.

> The Ask HN thing is so bizarre

Agreed. Second bit though, you just jump on the bandwagon?

You misread it.

The solution to that is to triple-click a paragraph and read it in reverse contrast; it's fine.

The reason for ask HN and other text submissions is explained somewhere on HN, it's to not give the original post an advantage over the comments. (Whether you agree with that policy is a legitimate debate, but that's the reason.) The solution is the same, triple-click.

It's not specific to Ask; any text post (as opposed to a URL post) will have grey text. I believe this is to encourage people to post links instead of text, though arguably now that Ask and Show have dedicated front pages they should get special treatment.

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