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Comment by pointerpointer | Hacker News Reader

This definitely applies to HN. HN should not grey out down voted comments. It is like there is no freedom of thought and speech on HN. If many people don't like what you're saying your idea gets censored while it might be very true. That is inherently wrong IMHO.

edit: HN, why not just showing how many up and down votes a comment gets? I am really curious why someones comment should be invisible. Sometimes I'm reading replies on a comment I cannot read because it's down voted, what's the point of it?

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I have never seen a comment that I couldn’t read because it was greyed out. I always saw it more or less as sign that I should either take the greyed out comment with a grain of salt (which makes it less likely for me to post a snarky reply underneath) or it shows me that the thing said there (or how it was said) is at least viewed as controversial.

Marking opinions is not censorship. Even if you’d mark posts with a bold red “lie” watermark, it wouldn’t be censorship.

The thing to keep in mind is: when the communicative tool of greying out is taken away, more people will write pointless responses.

> when the communicative tool of greying out is taken away, more people will write pointless responses.

It's as much a communication tool as physical violence is. It conveys zero information. Not having this "tool" would require people to think and argue, which is far from pointless.

> Marking opinions is not censorship.

You mean when a comment is not readable anymore it is 'marking' instead of censoring? So if China hides peoples opinion it is 'marking', like being a good thing? I don't get this.

> more people will write pointless responses

Is that scientifically proven?

They are supposed to be readable still. If you can't then that's an accessibility issue, not censorship. Try turning up your screens contrast.

Comments get further and further greyed out as they are voted down more and more, to the point where they do become unreadable. I've manually opened dev-tools just to read comments before. This is not an accessibility issue, this is definitely a censorship issue. Why should an unpopular opinion get greyed out to the point it's unreadable?

I don't have accessibility issues and I don't make this up. I've seen comments with a text color of #eee, I had to go into the inspector to make it readable.. Maybe that has been changed/fixed already which would make my entire comment pointless indeed. Personally I think grey out text should not exceed about #ccc.

Interesting, because HN's CSS only goes as high as #ddd.

Also, you can use text selection via mouse or appropriate touch gesture in order to read even the lightest-colored comment.

If you use Firefox, something I made a while ago might be useful to you, I certainly wouldn't want to read HN without anymore: https://pastebin.com/8StFpps9

To make comments readable, only the lines from 86 to 106 are needed.

I'm actually fine with HN's system because I think most of us know how to get at text which appears unreadable. But this seems like a very fair & reasonable suggestion.

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