Do you hide, read, or ignore grayed out comments? | Hacker News Reader

Do you hide, read, or ignore grayed out comments?

Recently there was a great discussion about reform of down votes, and how those affect a comment. I’ve been paying more attention to comments that are downvoted and grayed out, especially on highly contentious posts, so I’m curious how other people view those comments. Do you hide them, ignore, or read?

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Read, my first favorite comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613281 and I find it pretty accurate. Sometimes great comments turn grey just after posting only to bounce back up later, thanks to people taking time to read them. I’ve also had showdead enabled in my profile settings virtually the whole time I’ve been here, and been able to vouch for some wrongly killed posts, as the mods say:

> Currently, when an account is banned, a software filter trips, or enough users flag a post, the post goes [dead], meaning only users with ‘showdead’ turned on in their profile can see it. The trouble is that some posts end up [dead] when they shouldn’t be. Banned accounts sometimes post good comments, software filters sometimes have false positives, and users sometimes flag things unfairly. [https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/]

I feel like it has the Streisand Effect[1] on me and I often end up reading them. If anything because of a morbid curiosity haha.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Mostly read, sometimes I’ll even turn on showdead temporarily to view a thread that got killed. Often times the worst comments are upvoted enough to prevent greying.

Sometime if the resulting convo (or lack there of) is entirely poor (even from an entertainment perspective), I’ll collapse it.

I use user CSS to make them the same colour as all other comments.

I try to read them. I think it’s harder than it should be. I think it’s weird UI to use eye strain as a disincentive to read something controversial.

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