The low contrast text? You realize that this is a feature?

I don't find it to be a feature. I find it infantilising. "Other users didn't like this post, so we'll make it hard to read". I think it was a terrible design decision on an otherwise very clean site.

It's a very helpful hint as to which community contributed content is good quality.

Like Stack Overflow making the lower rated answers less obvious (at the bottom).

Oh, and SO greys out text too.

On Stack Overflow, where "Quality" can be quantified, this might work (even though stackoverflow slowly is failing - this being one of the reasons).

On mere discussion sites, quality does not equal popularity. Equating these two things leads to echo chambers.

Hmm, since the appearances of low-quality answers on SO are so different from the others, I usually end up moving the mouse over them impulsively to read them. Had SO not greyed out such postings, I would have simply ignored them and saved plenty of my time.

> Oh, and SO greys out text too.

If all your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

It's a feature I don't want and I use custom CSS to avoid it. It would be preferable if I didn't have to use client-side fixes for broken websites. If there is text being displayed by a website, it should be legible. Always. If you don't want me to read it, don't send the text to my browser.

Most bad design decisions are considered ‘features’ by those responsible.

Downvoted posts are meant to be harder and harder to read.

They are. This merges “I disagree with this” and “No one should read this”, yielding “No one should read things I disagree with”.

At least this makes the decision explicit, as opposed to the editing bubbles created by popular social networks.

Obviously. Not everyone finds that endearing.

This invites a kind of trolling. Imagine a bunch of people down-vote a comment quickly (justified or not), making it hard to read. Later readers who may have different opinions are discouraged from expressing them (up-voting) because the comment has become so hard to read it may not get read.

Yeah, but it sucks, because instead of just indicating that people have made it low-quality it makes it hard to read even if you would like to go ahead and brave reading a downvoted comment.

And on text posts. Whenever I see top-level text it looks like it's been downvoted to hell.