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Comment by zoky | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why “Show HN” and “Ask HN” posts are always, always in hard-to-read light gray? Is there some cabal that automatically downvotes such posts? Is there something intrinsic to The Algorithm that penalizes such posts? Or do I just have really bad luck and always manage to click through on posts that have gained traction despite having gotten enough downvotes to put them at risk of sudden termination?

This is one of the great HN mysteries to me, and if anyone can shed some light on it, it would be much appreciated.

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I think I read here on HN some time ago that it is intentionally hard to read to discourage posts with text. I think the reasoning was that posting links to external blogs / websites is usually higher quality than someone creating a quick post on HN.

Could be wrong though, just writing this from memory.

HN has some really non-obvious UX, between this and the mysterious green usernames I still don't understand. And the fact that only some users can downvote. Or the weird logic behind which words cannot appear in titles.

Green usernames are new accounts.

Only users with 500 karma can downvote.

Both are mechanisms to dull the potency of new users until they have a chance to learn how HN is expected to work.

This might sound gatekeeping, and it literally is, but consider than HN signup is open and takes 15 seconds with no verification. HN likes the way HN works and these provide simple rate-limits on destructive or oblivious change.

> this might sound gatekeeping, and it literally is

That term presumes unkept gates are preferable.

I grew up farming. One keeps one's gates or both wildlife and livestock run amuck.

> Green usernames are new accounts.

It made sense to me almost immediately, so since people aren't making the connection: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

>5 (informal) (of a person) young and without experience

> The new trainees are still very green.

Green usernames are for new users.

A comment has a green username if at the time of commenting the author was new. The colour remains. If you look at your first comments, you will see them green as well.

YCombinator founders have their own colours which are only visible to each other.

There are plenty of undocumented features like this one.

They are not penalized, the grey text applies to all text posts.

It's confusing, but greying out is used on HN for a single purpose: to discourage reading (and therefore writing).

Low-quality comments are greyed by downvotes from other users and moderators.

Text posts (including Ask and Show HN) are greyed automatically.

Ask/Show posters are encouraged to post a comment on their own story, and to let that comment rise or fall according to its up/down votes.

Meta-meta: Your comment might be downvoted for being meta to the post. It looks like it has already been "detached" from the comment tree so that it appears at the bottom instead of responding to up/downvotes. This is actually protective of your karma and this conversation. Your question is valid, but it's not germane to the post. If your comment was allowed to float to its normal location, it would be downvoted by others who considered it off-topic.

They aren’t downvoted; it’s just a styling thing. I believe dang gave some reasoning for deliberately making the post text less prominent, but I can’t remember it.

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