Contrary to previous experience, seeing this message for comments rated at -1 did not preclude me viewing them. In one instance I wished to see if the rating was warranted only to find repeatedly I could not open the message.
Is that a new design feature or is this a coding flaw? If it is the former, I suggest reverting to the previous behaviour, where at the user's explicit choice the message might be viewed.
Another comment pertaining to this issue, I had suspected this had been previously reported, however, all my attempts to search using slashdot beta bug and the string beneath your current threshold, failed to focus on the bug reporting for slashdot. In several cases I got zero matches and others way too many to search with the high probability ones obviously wrong.