What if I told you that you can just click on the comment permlink, and that gets rid of the graying. Nobody's being "silenced" here; it's just a way to quickly assess the level of confidence in a HN comment.
HN (and many, MANY other sites, including forums, product reviews, search engines) confuses "popularity" with "quality". If there was one thing on the Internet I could fix by waving a magic wand, it would be this idea that more people [liking|linking|upvoting] something means it is better. Crowdsourced curation doesn't work.
