The first personal browser extensión I ever wrote was to let me hover greyed out HN posts to read them. Dang’s justification is no reason to make them illegible. There’s just as much reason then to let people read it and see what behavior is looked down on here.

The fading disappears if you click "X minutes ago" above the comment, so they're always readable. (Your extension sounds like a nice solution too, though.)

Perhaps it's just your display/eyes? I find them readable even on maximum fade.

I get it, but this position makes HN definitively anti-free speech. You restrict speech and you restrict how people think. Calibrating speech is not free speech and neither is fading speech.

> the community signals that it has found something wrong with a comment.

A bully fat shaming would be "the community signaling that there is something wrong". The HN equivalent would be PC shaming.

What someone thinks of something has no bearing on right or wrong. Also "the community" isn't downvoting. It's always an individual.

A sincere course correcting response is the simple and natural fix, and what already happens. Downvoting helps with reducing responses, but comments are people. People do not enjoy being reduced.

> extremely important for calibrating users' perceptions of the community

I have enough experience now that I can write in HN mode. I cannot however, think in HN mode. I try, but whenever I think, comments like this one happens. This comment also violates the "ideology battle" clause from the HN guidelines because I am not allowed to fight for free speech. But stories about politics and ideologies make the top page all the time, and aren't most good disagreements ideological? Tabs versus spaces, React versus Vue, Open versus Closed source. Downvoting.

The technical part is never that deep. The deepest it can get is deeply technical.

With all that said, everything else about HN is the best on the internet hands down.

> I get it, but this position makes HN definitively anti-free speech

This is absolutely necessary to have a community. The moderation, both centralised in dang and distributed among the downvoters, is what makes HN HN and not a chan board. Removing comments deemed "bad" and thereby discouraging people from posting them in the first place adds value to the site.

It is far from perfect, but it's better than nothing.

> People do not enjoy being reduced.

No, but people don't enjoy being insulted either, and nor do they enjoy the "oh not this again" feeling that makes them reach for the downvote button in the first place.

(Disclaimer: I'm #24 in HN karma and #32 on electronics.stackexchange, so undoubtedly count as deeply embedded with the ""establishment"" downvoting all the edgy rebels)

> This is absolutely necessary to have a community.

Do you want a community/bubble or be open to other's idea ?

I downvote comments which I think make bad arguments. They either posit something without justifying it, or simply re-state what they said in their last comment.

This is not a judgement of the commenter's self-worth—merely of what I think other users ought to see. This way, the most interesting comments rise to the top, the least interesting comments fade away, and HN becomes a more interesting place with a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

In the case of your comment, I personally felt it was just a rehash of your prior comment (which does not appear to have a negative score as of this writing), without adding anything new. The comment reads "it's not downvote or nothing," but doesn't offer a plausible alternative for maintaining HN's high level of discourse.

Because the comment didn't contain anything new (as far as I could tell), I couldn't respond without perpetuating a circuitous thread. My response would likely have been downvoted as well, and rightly so.

I also downvoted your followup "why was I downvoted" comment, because the guidelines say not to discuss comment scores. I like this guideline, because arguing about comment votes is boring and uninteresting. Furthermore, if I answered your question, I'd be breaking the guideline myself. I'm now doing it anyway because you asked multiple times. :)

It's very possible that the other downvoters and I all misunderstood your comment. Then again, if we all misunderstood, it's likely other readers will too, and I'm thinking of their reading experience.

Anyway, I hope you'll stick around and I definitely hope you did not die!

> Dang actually considers the comment fading an absolutely essential feature:

All rulers like the tools helping them reign over their fiefdom.

edit: I actually do most of my HN reading through premii.com, so I ignore all the fading and all the stupid pagination.

the same could be said about flagged comments but you can opt out of the default behavior there. there's basically no excuse imo. if this site was open source a I'd create a pull request, but alas.

You can opt into seeing dead comments, but they're still clearly delineated as dead, alongside maximum fading.

yes, exactly - if what I described existed you could still see your karma by clicking your profile and downvoted comments could still be marked as such by simply saying so instead of ruining accessibility and graying it out, making it harder to read. the ability to click the comment and see it no longer grayed out isn't really a solution since it's still harder to read the comment and ascertain whether it would be worth clicking it to begin with.