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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

One thing I think it should have mentioned is that although comment scores are not shown to anyone but the user, it is easy enough to infer them, at least approximately. Obviously, negative scores are shown by desaturation. And positive scores are shown by sort order.

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I hate the desaturation, I should add a user.css entry for it or something. Effectively silencing non-mainstream views seems so contrary to hacker culture to me.

Contrarian views aren't usually down voted here, low quality posts are. Troll posts that may have some semblance of an actual point should be rephrased to actually be part of a discussion.

I disagree - the are at least 2 top level comments on this story now that are greyed out. I consider them to be well-made, definitely not flames or spam, clearly written but contrary to the apparent majority view.

Even uncontroversial statements of fact get down-voted.

Take this:

>"Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything beyond warm fuzzies." //

assuming the commenter didn't lie then it is a fact, they started their thought. Now the down-voters may know vouching revives comments, but that's no reason to downvote, that's reason to respond with a source.

Even if they are mistaken, it's harsh to downvote a view that can't be easily corrected because of hidden information.

Meh.

Yea, I just finished a comment about this very topic before I read yours. People here will downvote anything. There’s a big voting audience, and chances are there will be at least some people who disagree with you on any topic. Best to just roll with it.

This isn't true on any political topic. I've seen people who are far better authors than myself have posts downvoted to dead because they disagreed with the prevailing opinion in a thread.

Don't new comments get momentarily bumped to the top before dropping, before they get any votes?

They do. I also have the impression that the number of childs influences sort order.

> positive scores are shown by sort order

I don't believe it is quite so simple. Remark ordering also appears to incorporate

* freshness (new remarks get a moment at the top)

* reputation (remarks from high-karma accounts linger higher, longer)

and I may possibly have also observed:

* a penalty box: hidden downweighting, or reduction in effective karma, imposed by moderators upon troublesome users that weren't egregious enough to ban/shadowban.

That's all correct except "remarks from high-karma accounts linger higher, longer". Account karma doesn't affect ranking.

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