Our great sponsors
-
refined-hacker-news
✨ Hacker News, but refined — Interface tweaks and features to make the HN experience better
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
It seems that HN has a lot of anti-user features for the sake of it. Perhaps the rationale for graying out self posts is to make them not stand out (so that the post from OP doesn't get any undue advantage over the comments), but it's just an accessibility nightmare. It's as if people with poor eyesight were not welcome here.
I use Refined Hacker News https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news which alleviates some pain points, but unfortunately it doesn't fix this issue.
I had the same question and made a browser extension that addresses many of the complaints in this thread (poorly-positioned elements, sizing, dark mode): https://github.com/dan-lovelace/hacker-news-pro. It lets you completely rebuild the layout however you'd like and has some pre-made themes that do a decent job without writing one from scratch.