Consider highlighting usernames for everyone in a darker shade of grey. The username is the most important thing in the line; it should stand out.

I agree with tptacek - if you're going to indicate that some commenters are better than others, make them darker rather than orange.

And here's a theoretical underpinning to explain so it doesn't come across as simply a subjective design choice: coloring objects darker or lighter with different shades of the same base color to show intensity is one of the few principles I remember from an Edward Tufte workshop from a few years ago. Varying levels of saturation indicate a shift in degree, whereas different colors altogether imply that the objects are of differing qualities.

Applied to the new commenting feature, darker colors would imply more "solid" feelings of trustworthiness, similar to how trolls already get washed out with the lighter shades.

Similarly, that explains another thing wrong with the highlighting - "alarm" colors like orange, red, yellow etc indicate that something's wrong, whereas bolding or darkening the names wouldn't imply that at all.

Trying to suss out good and bad comments reminds me of the 37signals Troll Cap and the "Good Comment" crown:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/introducing_the_troll...

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_crown_of_royalty....

The comment which I am replying to by tptacek currently demonstrates undesigned behavior which I have seen on other pages: to the best of my understanding, highlighting is done on a per-poster not per-comment basis, yet highlighting behavior is inconsistently applied to highlighted posters. You can see tptacek's comment earlier in the thread which is highlighted, while the parent comment of this comment is not. (Further, the parent comment is actually highlighted on the reply-to screen.)

Not too important but, to quote our house dev motto, "behavior contrary to specification mandates a bug report no matter how minor the deviation is".

[Edit: I refresh this page and am seeing it sometimes highlighted and sometimes not highlighted, so I'm not sure if my bug report is accurate or not. Apparently the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to bugs: attempting to describe one changes its behavior.]

I think this is explained by a previous news item on the linked page. pg talks about introducing lots of caching to speed the site up. Sounds like you're seeing cached bits and pieces.

i'd say the line is minimally important. flag might be crucial, though i've never personally had to use it. the link and parent links, as well as time, are convenient.

i bet discussion interestingness improves by removing the username and points.

Not username. That would make it harder to know when you're having a back-and-forth, and that changes the nature of the discussion. Removing points would be a good idea, though - is there any advantage to having that visible beforehand?

knowing you're having a back and forth with the same person is one cause of long flame wars. not knowing who you're talking to keeps things less emotional and more polite. i think.

the advantage of seeing points is the same as seeing orange usernames. it allows people to decide which comments they want to read.

Nah. Think about 4chan. When you remove usernames you encourage trolling more than you do lengthy responses.

I think if you're going to read, you might as well read everything that isn't grayed out with downvotes.

No, but that gets rid of the really clean feel! I like that this site's only got 4 (5, now) colors. It feels so minimal that way. (Then, I enjoy the feeling when I discover something like clicking a user name and finding that it's a link when it's the first time; perhaps that's not the attitude pg wants?)

Agreed. It'd be nice to foster more of a community of users with real identities & relationships.