
Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments? - ronilan
Long long time ago HN comments had visible scores. Then it was changed[1]. That was also a long time ago.<p>These days, all comments with positive scores display the same. Comments with negative scores, however, are “dim-lighted” with lighter (and lighter) gray font.<p>While In theory “dim-lighting” should make the comment less visible, it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.<p>What do you think?
How is this effecting discussion?
Any better UI ideas?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2595605
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kragormonkey
> Any better UI ideas?

Reddit has pre-collapsed comments, which seem reasonable. But that will
collapse the whole thread, which is undesirable.

> it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.

I'm more interested in the premise of this question.

(a) Is really this true, and backed up by HN-scraping of some sort?

(b) Do we want it to attract less attention? Sometimes they attract insightful
replies explaining a common misconception.

In short: what problem are we trying to fix? Has this really reduced the
quality of threads by much? By what metric and by how much?

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rapnie
Agree. Would not be in favor of Reddit-like collapse. Overall I am happy with
current system.

Slightly OT: On mobile the up- and downvote arrows are too close together. For
every vote I have to zoom in to accurately click the right one. I suggested to
HN Support to place the downvote arrow to the right of the comment header, or
have a separator/spacing between the 2 arrows.

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ChrisGranger
I personally use custom CSS to make the dimmed comments black when I hover
them, so I can more easily read them if I so choose.

I don't really have an issue with comment dimming. It shows that a significant
number of users find the comment to be more noise than signal, so that those
who wish to avoid such can do so easily.

I _think_ I've seen some pre-collapsed threads here as well... specifically
ones where an HN administrator has taken some sort of action and commented on
that.

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rapnie
> I personally use custom CSS to make the dimmed comments black when I hover
> them, so I can more easily read them if I so choose.

That is a nice solution, but does not work on mobile. Could be part of
standard HN though (maybe configurable). I usually select the text, so it
becomes readable.

