Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

Post by AndrewWarner » Fri, Feb 06, 2009, 4:43 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #21

alabut wrote: post #3

I haven't seen a rationale for it yet but I'd guess that it's a subtle way of encouraging descriptions to be short (like the one you just wrote), it's probably intentional that it's hard to read long rambling posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468139 I read a pg comment somewhere that makes me think that's his design decision - he already weighs "Ask HN" type of posts differently than the standard one wit…

Yes; I do this to discourage people from making too many such posts, and making them too long. I don't want HN to turn into a blogging platform. Also, I wanted to make it easy to tell these posts from comments. If I made the text black I'd have to make it smaller, and then it would look just like a comment. But I'm not wedded to the current way of doing things. I'd be open to alternatives.

Post by alabut » Sat, Feb 07, 2009, 10:20 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #35

pg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; I do this to discourage people from making too many such posts, and making them too long. I don't want HN to turn into a blogging platform. Also, I wanted to make it easy to tell these posts from comments. If I made the text black I'd have to make it smaller, and then it would look just like a comment. But I'm not wedded to the current way of doing things. I'd be open to alternatives.

It seems like this system punishes me, the reader, for something that the poster did wrong. If the poster is supposed to write his long rants on his blog and then link them here, the software should tell him. It shouldn't subtly make his stuff harder for me to read, because if I'm interested, I'm going to push through the low contrast text anyway. Anyway, if you want to nurture the community, I don't think it's a bad…