Comment by mishmash

The second comment was 300 words long with about 20 of them used for the setup and mention of karma. It was an attempt to explain the first, which is something I care about, and should be obvious considering it was so clearly not going to be popular with HNchan. So that doesn't seem like a meta discussion to me - although your comment and this reply most definitely are now.

Both mentions were probably more part social commentary than complaint. I mean it was already completely grey, and isn't the whole point of fading out comments so that other people aren't bothered by them? If so then fading out does not work because that comment was downvoted 20+ times. So after the first -4, we had 16 other people highlight the comment, read it, and downvote it. That's a broken system.

And notice I derisively referred to it as a signed integer - that was deliberate because in the great wide universe that is my life, an integer stored in database somewhere is something I care eternally less about than the content of my comments and the realization I hoped to spur...