Easy on the anti-designer bigotry there, dude, it's only the crappy designers that use super low contrast text just because they think it's cool. That's not the case here - see my comment below and pg's confirmation for a rational discussion behind its usage here on HN, it's a very intentional decision and serves the intent well.
Now whether the intent is right or not (should HN morph more into a Metafilter-like free-for-all message board for hacker types, rather than a structured conversation around links?) is a different discussion. I like the current orientation towards news.
Remember CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) and The Zen of CSS Design book? And Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)? Way cool when cutting edge designers were figuring out what CSS 2.1 is capable of. But such low contrast! And lots of tan. Then the candy-colors-on-white "Web 2.0" look hit... Another year, another DTD.
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 with links, for example. Maybe it's to ward off too much navel-gazing.
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 idea to make the feedback deliberate. "This is too long, don't post it," will be a lot more effective than changing the color of the text.
Well, the lighter text does punish the original poster, indirectly. It lowers the likelihood of engagement by an audience and I like that subtle approach more than heavy-handed alert warnings. Sites that have that kind of approach feel like I'm in the principal's office and being scolded for no good reason. Subtle encouragement to do other types of behavior feels more like I'm in a hippie montessori school instead - we're not going to come down with the stick if you behave a certain way, but we're not going to give you the carrot unless you do better.
The fact that people are complaining about not being able to read longer blocks of text means it's working just fine. And it's a nice subtle touch - I never consciously considered why I tend to ignore rambling posts and stick to the discussion area instead until now.
Not sure that limiting the textarea would help - it's not like it constrains the length of these replies, for example. It's pretty trivial to compose a block of text in Textmate and paste it in, I'll often do that just for the spell checking or to make sure it doesn't get lost in submission or browser crash or whatever. (and often to review and make sure I don't post something I'll regret)
That was in fact the post that triggered this one. I gave up reading it after the second paragraph.
However it was mainly because I wasn't interested in the topic, but had checked all the other articles out. There are some long self posts that are genuinely interesting to read and it still hurts my eyes to read them.
Very interesting idea. Do you mean each paragraph in a post gets lighter as it goes on or the color for the entire comment block fades depending on overall length?
Or if you're like me and find all the white backgrounds hurt your eyes, its simple to enforce black background / green text which makes reading much easier on the eyes, it also makes grey text easier to read.
(When it's really light, I use Firebug to modify the CSS.)