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Comment by rlongstaff | Hacker News Reader

Both the font size and colour scheme on that page hurt my eyes.

On the plus side, it gave you something to complain about.

Pointing out flaws is a perfectly valid and useful activity, especially when there is significant room for improvement, like in this case.

When it's not clear that someone who can do something about it is even present, it's usually just an "in" to post a low-value comment. Zap all the thousands of aggregator comments complaining about fonts/background-colours and nothing of value would be lost.

It is still information, which can be useful. For example, I am working on a redesign of a website where they are insisting on making the text unreadably small because "it looks like geocities" if they text is normal. If these kinds of people repeatedly see people complaining about small text, they will eventually get a clue and the web will have fewer unreadable sites.

> Zap all the thousands of aggregator comments complaining about fonts/background-colours and nothing of value would be lost.

Sure, if you don't have a visual impairment. I do, and even though it's a very mild one, if one in 100 blog posts submitted to HN consider changing their colour scheme due to people complaining about it I would say it is worth it. And frequently I do see people changing their colour schemes based on HN feedback.

The point is: take it to the author, not those standing around you on the bus.

Nonsense. The message is a good one for everyone to hear. It's not a mistake specific to one specific author. It's a mistake commonly made by lots of people, and so the more awareness there is of how to avoid the mistake, the better.

I simply disagree. Internet commenters in general are on red alert looking for any little thing to complain about. So many of these complaints are not worth clogging the tubes with or necessarily even valid at all.

(depth of this thread and meta-meta-meta acknowledged and ceased)

Just add this custom css to the page and it should be much more legible:

body { background: white; color: black; line-height: 27px; }

#outer-wrapper { font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11pt; }

That will only work on Mac OS X. Just use "font-family: sans-serif", it'll look fine on any system.

Safari Reader mode to the rescue...

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