Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?

#1

Post by ronilan » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

Long long time ago HN comments had visible scores. Then it was changed[1]. That was also a long time ago.

These days, all comments with positive scores display the same. Comments with negative scores, however, are “dim-lighted” with lighter (and lighter) gray font.

While In theory “dim-lighting” should make the comment less visible, it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.

What do you think? How is this effecting discussion? Any better UI ideas?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?

#2

Post by kragormonkey » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

> 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?

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?

#3

Post by rapnie » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 6:48 AM UTC

kragormonkey wrote: post #2

> 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 expl…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?

#4

Post by ChrisGranger » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:14 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?

#5

Post by rapnie » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 8:13 AM UTC

ChrisGranger wrote: post #4

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 admi…

> 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.