How about now? Story titles are still clickable links, but are black. Made the story count a link as well, and kept it blue as a visual cue.

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felideon 12 days ago | parent | next [-]

Some additional feedback:

There's no reason for both the story count and the story summary to be clickable. It's confusing because:

(a) It's not clear what the number in parentheses even means (until you click and infer)

(b) Separate links makes you think they lead to different pages

Also, echoing another comment, it's not really clear what "incoming" and "outgoing" stories mean. Maybe "new" vs. "stale"?

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taftster 12 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Better, to be honest. Keep refining of course. But this is definitely more readable.

I admit that straight black is not quite the right answer either. A slightly toned down dark grey would be nice. And again, subjectively, I like how HN has a row of non-link smaller (lighter shaded) text under each listing, which I think plays nice for the white space between each item.

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bcrl 12 days ago | parent [-]

Personally, I far prefer black over grey. Grey is really hard to read across a variety of lighting conditions and devices. The older you get, the more important contrast becomes.

	▲	taftster 12 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fair and good point. Sharp black bothers me, so just adding in a little hue is nice for my eyes. But that's me, of course. Noting also that this text is #000000 black, per the CSS. Maybe the background color helps soften it a little? Like contrast white/black is hard on the eyes, but HN is not?