Srsly, all this "if you keep on commenting regularly, on lots of posts, soon after they're posted and contribute to the conversation in a way that we like as based on our own somewhat arbitrary rules and you are 'funny' (by which we mean puns as this is the only sense of humour we value) we might, after a few months,…

It's frustrating, right? Cause I am in the grey, and yet I tend to overlook comments in the grey. I doubt every reader reads every comment and would wager that many only read the highlighted ones. So how is one to receive recommendations when there is a possible decreased likelihood of the comment ever being read?…

Wow you mean if I'm accepted by the cool kids I'll be popular? Wow it's just like being in high school all over again. Oh joy.

You're right, who cares what it actually does. Let's let the love flow free!

When I hear "the grey", I think of that really ridiculous Liam Neeson movie about wolves... makes me think we're all out in a frozen wasteland somewhere, huddling around a twig fire and eating bark to survive.

I don't know if it does anything to actually move comments, but I can tell you that I like getting notifications that someone has "recommended" my post! I look at it as similar to "liking" comments on Facebook. I interpret a recommendation as "yes, I agree with you and like what you're saying but I don't have the…

Same here. I have a comment history that proves I am no troll, and I try to contribute meaningfully to the conversation at hand. However, I do not have all day every day free to post enough times that everyone will recognize my name. It took me a year of Jezebel reading to feel like I could finally comment on…

Yeah, I'm just going to second all of this. I feel like I'm shouting into the void with the new commenting system. My posts get recommended, but even most of those are still grey. I like Jez, and used to feel like I was part of the community— but I just don't have a lot of time to devote to commenting, so I feel…

I'm still deciding how I feel about it. I'm glad Nancy's cousin isn't making $8796 a week online anymore, but the gray is weird. Back in the days of stars they were red, though, right? And I liked the original way. Mostly because I liked having a star, sigh. The glory days.

Count me amongst the haters who would sorta have liked to be an insider but is not going to put in the effort.

Who could have known that being normalized would become so aspirational?

Related — is there a way for the brave among us to automatically treat all comments as valid? If not, there definitely should be, and I would doubt it would be all that difficult. The grey interrupts my reading flow.

I'm glad you guys had this exchange, because it cleared up a lot. I stalked Jezzie for quite a few months, and only started commenting recently before kinja set it, and this helped a lot. If this was a more traditional thread system, I wish I could "sticky" this somehow for new users/confused people.

I am with you. I haaaaaate it. They changed the side-scrolling chunks-of-comments thing (which was awful), but now there's some kind of grey bars midway through threads (but not actually threads) showing "participants" (but not really) that you have to expand to display the accurate thread (but still not really) and…

aasddssdffff would someone help the poor thing?!

now I want a salad made of nothing but bacon. Thanks, Laura. Thanks loads.

I hate when my two course meal of adorable chubbly fluff jumps up and runs away! Get back here for dessert!

He is fat....but adorable.....didn't think he was going to get the hind end out of the bowl there for a few seconds....but, phew, he made it. Adorable!!!

Strangely enough, I had a very fat beagle (thyroid issues, common with beagles) when I was a kid who would eat lettuce. She'd eat an entire head of lettuce if you left one unattended.

Those little pups are adorable, and that one would be my favorite. I used to have a Chow Chow like that but mine was solid black. Consequently the best dog I ever had.