Feedback when a comment gets removed by moderator [duplicate]

Question

I have this habit, of making snide remarks on questions of poor quality. In the vast majority of cases the question ends up being closed anyway, and I only add my comment after the question has started receiving the close votes, so its fate is more or less known. But still, there appears to be a problem.

For example, there is this question asking how to learn microcoding, to which I added a comment saying "you begin by finding a micromonitor and a microkeyboard". The question already had one close vote and two downvotes at the time I added that comment, and @gnat had already added the standard comment saying "career and education advice is explicitly off-topic per help center. See meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/a/6488/40980".

I know comments of this type are not a good idea, and I should refrain from posting them. Usually they point to some of the issues of the question, instead of being purely joking, as the above example is, but I agree, they are nothing but a habit that I should kick. But please read on, I have something to ask which has to do with how this web site works.

So, it appears that some moderator has actually gone into the trouble of removing that comment of mine.

Which is fine, I am not complaining about it, as I said I know I should not have made that remark in the first place. My issue is of an entirely different nature.

Here is the rub: I did not receive any notification about the fact that my comment was removed.

This is not a one-off kind of event, the other day I had done a similar thing, and it was the first time I begun to realize that there must be moderators on stackexchange who go around removing inappropriate comments. And then it downed upon me that these snide remarks of mine may have been axed by moderators for years, and I would not know, because I have not been receiving any notifications, nor do I remember every single post on which I once left a snide remark to go see if it is still there.

So, I would have probably realized that these comments are not welcome on stackexchange a lot sooner if I had been receiving notifications about such instances of moderation events, and many of these comments would have never been posted in the first place if I had received notifications the first few times I wrote comments of this kind.

So, shouldn't there be some kind of notification sent when comments are removed for reasons of inappropriateness?

Amendment 1

If someone like me is finding out that comments are ephemeral after a couple of years of using the site, then clearly, some kind of information is missing somewhere. Generally, you cannot force people to read walls of text of "terms of use" before using a site, so when you have an opportunity to send additional information by means of notifications about actions taken by the user, that's an opportunity worth pursuing. In other words, notifications about things are good.

Amendment 2

So, this is worse than I thought. If it is possible that a comment containing useful information may be deleted, then I believe that a notification should really be sent, and it should contain the original text of the comment, in case the OP has a use for it.

Answer 1

How would the notification have changed anything, though? What would you have done differently?

We send people notifications when there's something actionable for them, or when an event occurs that would reinforce their motivation to participate. Telling people that something they wrote that is by nature not designed to be permanent was removed isn't .. either of those things.

For stuff that isn't fun-poking, it should be part of the question if it's going to last. There are some exceptions like "Buyer beware - this answer will produce code that works, but it's dangerous" as a compromise to a disagreement that didn't reach editorial consensus. These, however, are rare enough that they can be treated as exceptions.

The amount of belly-aching this would cause alone makes it a very expensive thing to implement. People get very attached to even their most tiny creations. In the case of comments on an extremely high signal-to-noise platform, those creations are unfortunately not likely to last very long. I see your point about how this could help to teach in a just-in-time way, but I'm pretty confident that would be in an underwhelming minority of cases.

Most people would just start screaming at the wall, or, worse, each other.

Answer 2

No, there shouldn't be any notification. Comments are not meant to be permanent, and one must assume that his/her comment might be deleted any moment, no matter how good/useful it is.

That's why it's very very important to always edit any useful information found in comments into the post itself, so it won't be lost in the void.

For the record, most comments are removed without any moderator intervention: enough flags from ordinary users (starting at three, more flags required if the comment has upvotes) and the comment is automagically deleted. For more details, see this faq post, under "Comment flags".

Answer 3

The community can and does remove unhelpful comments by flagging them. Seems like you're calling for the community to leave more "Mike, that was really unhelpful, please don't leave that kind of comment" meta comments. At first glance these seem like a terrible idea since they have nothing to do with the question, but I can see how they might also send a message to the poor person who asked and is already getting downvotes and closevotes that "hey, we don't actually hate you and mock you for the joy of it, we're here to help and that guy doesn't represent us." It's possible that the mere removing of a snarky comment doesn't send that message strongly enough. (Emotional support is not the strong suit of this network of sites.)

Consider a different meta post in which you urge community members to uphold their site's tone with comments in addition to flagging snarky comments. I know that some sites already do that.