Comment by jsf01

Seems common here that many interesting discussions are also controversial and therefore result in a lot of downvotes. It’s a pain to read downvoted comments because of the low contrast despite them sometimes being insightful yet unpopular. I also catch myself automatically taking a harsher stance towards grayed out messages before even reading them. I wouldn’t be surprised if many downvotes come in after the initial graying out of a comment, a sort of dogpile based more on herd effects than the content itself. In all, the current voting system doesn’t work well when it comes to controversy. Maybe that’s somewhat appropriate for this community since most tech news isn’t all that controversial. But it’s unfortunate that it’s so damn hard to read unpopular comments on this site. And impossible to reply to them. Are the mods open to changing the grayed-out punishment for downvoted comments to something else?