Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?

5 pointsronilan4 comments

Long long time ago HN comments had visible scores. Then it was changed[1]. That was also a long time ago.

These days, all comments with positive scores display the same. Comments with negative scores, however, are “dim-lighted” with lighter (and lighter) gray font.

While In theory “dim-lighting” should make the comment less visible, it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.

What do you think? How is this effecting discussion? Any better UI ideas?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605

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> Any better UI ideas?

Reddit has pre-collapsed comments, which seem reasonable. But that will collapse the whole thread, which is undesirable.

> it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.

I'm more interested in the premise of this question.

(a) Is really this true, and backed up by HN-scraping of some sort?

(b) Do we want it to attract less attention? Sometimes they attract insightful replies explaining a common misconception.

In short: what problem are we trying to fix? Has this really reduced the quality of threads by much? By what metric and by how much?

Agree. Would not be in favor of Reddit-like collapse. Overall I am happy with current system.

Slightly OT: On mobile the up- and downvote arrows are too close together. For every vote I have to zoom in to accurately click the right one. I suggested to HN Support to place the downvote arrow to the right of the comment header, or have a separator/spacing between the 2 arrows.

I personally use custom CSS to make the dimmed comments black when I hover them, so I can more easily read them if I so choose.

I don't really have an issue with comment dimming. It shows that a significant number of users find the comment to be more noise than signal, so that those who wish to avoid such can do so easily.

I think I've seen some pre-collapsed threads here as well... specifically ones where an HN administrator has taken some sort of action and commented on that.

> I personally use custom CSS to make the dimmed comments black when I hover them, so I can more easily read them if I so choose.

That is a nice solution, but does not work on mobile. Could be part of standard HN though (maybe configurable). I usually select the text, so it becomes readable.

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