So this morning I was looking through my blog and noticed that some of my posts appear gray and I got to wondering...does this mean the posts have been flagged? As a side note, yes I did mess up the day for the color challenge on Saturday as seen in the post at the top...but that's beside the point of this post.
I'm new here so I did a little research and thankfully found this post by 
https://steemit.com/steemit/@fingolfin/how-to-tell-if-your-post-has-been-flagged
After checking the posts that appeared gray in my own blog, I didn't see any "-" signs next to the names of people who had voted on the post and I didn't see any dots next to the little flag icon like was shown in the post I referenced above. A flagged post will appear like this...(I got this image from the post I referenced above as well, thanks again
Next, I used the second method mentioned in the post and noticed that the posts that appeared gray in my own blog don't have any downvotes...so what's going on here? Why do they appear gray when I view my blog?
I did a little bit of poking around on my own and discovered something that was a bit of a relief--a post will show up GRAY (to the user at least) after you've already clicked on it to open it once before. I went to my feed just to test this theory and sure enough, after I clicked on the top post and then exited out of it it appeared gray. Sweet relief!
I guess the intent is to give the user an easy method to see which posts they've opened and read (or at least opened). Thanks Steemit!
Maybe this is common knowledge to folks who've been around awhile but I thought I'd share my experience in case others were curious about this. I'm pretty happy to see I haven't pissed anyone off who has significant voting power or really anyone else (from what I can tell). I've tried pretty hard to follow the expected code of etiquette on this site because
- etiquette is important to me in general
- I've seen others who have had their posts flagged and their reputation score suffers as well as their earnings
So in conclusion, a post appearing gray to you isn't necessarily bad. It may just mean that you've clicked on your own post and nothing more. :)