It's worse than just contrast. The text is so thin, light, and small, that parts of the glyphs can't even be rendered. There are literally not enough pixels to draw the open area of the top half of an "e" in the usernames below the titles.
Part of it is Chrome's messed up subpixel antialiasing (for which I've had an open bug report since September when they broke it), part is just making text way too small for anything but a 30" Retina display, if that exists.