I've polled my friends about this, and our group is a about 50/50. Some of us when looking at comments never read the usernames, we just completely skip over it. And some alway do - the next is right there of course you'd read it!
It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any obvious correlation between other traits in my informal survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set of personality traits that correlates with reading vs ignoring user names.
I don't skip commentor names intentionally, but HN makes it really easy with the stupid (not sorry) light grey on slightly darker grey text. Contrast is an accessibility issue, and HN sucks at it.
