>maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey.
Maybe that's the problem? That is, maybe bad comments are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, like the weather; everyone talks about them but nobody bothers to downvote them to unreadable greyness.
(either that, or there are voting rings that devote themselves to upvoting greyed-out comments).
Any dodgy comment with reasonable age seems to be slammed by the time I get to it. Someone must be down voting them. And I can't recall seeing evidence of groups up voting junk comments, only stories. Everything seemed to be working OK to me. I find the quality of comments on HN to be very good and don't think this new feature is necessary.
While I agree that generally the quality is high, I do feel that over the past two years (or so) that I've been active here, I've been seeing more and more reddit-like puns or empty comments. They're not overwhelming, and generally harmless enough, content-wise, but I do find them annoying. I welcome this attempt to fix the situation before it becomes too bad.
I down vote them when I see them. I figure that will discourage people from repeating that style of comment and a few of them here and there won't wreck anything.
Maybe that's the problem? That is, maybe bad comments are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, like the weather; everyone talks about them but nobody bothers to downvote them to unreadable greyness.
(either that, or there are voting rings that devote themselves to upvoting greyed-out comments).