Fixing comments in 5 minutes. Intrigued? Let's discuss

Question

I made a quick change to Area 51 recently, and it had a profound effect on how people used that site, so let's discuss.

Background:

The basic building blocks of every SE site are the QUESTION and the ANSWER. They are clearly portrayed as such, so if anyone puts "something else" in that space, it's such an obvious UI gaff, folks have no problem spotting it and fixing it — we have nearly 100% compliance.

Comments are something else. We have a section inviting folks to simply "add comment" (definition: respond? gossip? talk?), and yet we yell at them if they do it wrong. Then we spend an inordinate amount of time (and resources) cleaning them up (with barely a dent, I should add).

Comments actually have two primary use cases — to ask for clarification or to suggest improvements to a post. If you disagree with that characterization, maybe suggest something more succinct below.

So looking at Area 51 for a moment (our site-creation process), users are asked to post "example questions" (with comments) to help define the proposed site. Unfortunately I also flag dozens-to-hundreds of posts daily simply to remove misplaced answers and other minutia from comments which simply don't belong there. It's very time consuming, and largely ineffective.

But it never stops.

Only recently, I changed the comment prompt in Area 51 from "add comment" to "suggest improvements" (the primary use case for example questions), and that number dropped to essentially… ZERO!

Feature Request

• Change "add comment" under the question to "ask for clarification" _{^{(or suggest something better)}}
• Change "add comment" under the answer to "suggest improvements"

This isn't an exact match for all possible use cases for comments, but it's enough to give a user pause when they're about to post something that is (as it turns out) wildly outside what we generally consider valid comments. These cover the PRIMARY use cases for comments. You may disagree, but I welcome wording improvements. We just have to be a bit wary of making this too wordy (or obscure), and end up trading one misuse for another.

Before you respond:

The current UI is a trap. It lures in unsuspecting users to do one thing while those who live in meta enforce something else. That's the rub — there's a real-world understanding of what it means to "comment", and then there's Stack Exchange.

Unfortunately we can't let comments become a free-form chatting forum in the current implementation, so my suggestion is to at least provide better signage about what the feature is meant to be used for in the current implementation.

You can't change ingrained user behaviors with larger FAQs and more meta posts. You have to get it right in the UI. A prompt change will not cure every problem folks encounter with comments, but this simple "fix" largely amounts to a copy change — and now it's been field tested and shown to be extremely effective.

Let's do this!

Answer 1

Good idea. I have two suggestions.

1. The text to add comments should read "suggest improvements" for both answers and questions.

Requesting clarification on a question is a subset of comments that suggest improvements on questions. A different but still appropriate use of comments on questions would be something like "This question is somewhat opinion-based. However, I think if you asked about y instead of x, it would be more answerable." So I think the "suggest improvements" wording is appropriate for questions as well as answers.

I like the "suggest improvements" label because it encourages comments to be nice. There's a world of difference between "you need to consider y" and "have you thought about y? It's an interesting counterexample to the points you've raised here, and it might be worth discussing." Phrasing things as suggestions makes them sound nicer, even though there isn't any difference in the information contained. (I personally struggle with writing comments that are polite suggestions, so maybe the new UI might help. At the very least it will make me spend some time thinking about my comments.)

Gilles argues that this change would encourage people to leave comments instead of editing posts. What this argument misses is the fact that the people who leave comments instead of editing posts are already doing so. I doubt that this feature request would convince someone about to make an edit to leave a comment; I am convinced that this feature request would cut down on excessive comments, arguments in comments, etc. If you want to encourage more people to edit content, that would require a serious culture change in how people see edits, not a change to the commenting UI.

2. The OP of the question/answer should see a "respond to suggestions" button.

A different use of comments that hasn't been considered in this feature request is that comments are used by the OP to respond to requests for clarification/suggestions for improvement. If someone comments on one of my posts with a suggestion, once I improve my post I'll respond with a simple "fixed" message. Or if I decide that the suggested improvement won't actually improve the post, I'll respond with a comment explaining why.

These are useful uses of comments. But most of the time, the only person who should be leaving these comments is the OP. And 99% of the time, the OP won't be suggesting improvements to their own posts in comments. In fact, I would probably argue that responding to suggestions is the only thing OPs should be using comments for. So let's use a "respond to suggestions" button instead. This make implementation a little bit more complicated, but the data suggests that this would be worth it.

Once someone leaves a suggestion and the OP responds, the interface makes it clear that the conversation should be over. Which is how things should work.

---

It's important to recognize that the UI text is not an absolute statement on the nature of comments. Comments still work the way they've always worked; a new UI does not force anyone to change their behavior. What it does do is suggest changes to behavior. If the situation warrants it, there is nothing stopping people from ignoring the suggestion.

Answer 2

While there may be room for some wording improvement, neither of your proposals match what comments are intended for.

ask for clarification

Comments on a question can be used to ask for a clarification, but they can also be used for other things, including replying to notify a commenter that the question has been updated, providing advice to improve a question (which is much broader than asking for clarifications), etc.

suggest improvements

This one is worse because the primary means to suggest an improvement to an answer is to (suggest an) edit. Comments on answers are to request clarifications. We already have far too many people who comment on an answer to point out mistakes when they should be editing it instead. Comments are to request clarifications, to inquire about a potential mistake, or to point out a problem which is too major to fix with an edit.

Answer 3

For main sites - yeah, this mostly feels like a good idea.

I'd suggest a few small tweaks. For a question that one asks themselves - "Ask for clarification" makes no sense. It might as such make a little more sense to rename "provide clarification" there instead. In a sense, if we're going to tailor these for context - we need to go far enough that it makes sense.

In some cases, I've found that I've actually been asked (or have asked for) clarifications in an answer.

For metas though, I suspect the status quo feels like it makes more sense. Metas are strange and comments actually are used primarily as comments.

Answer 4

I have a serious issue with this suggestion, and that's that it will discourage one of the primary use cases for comments at present: meta discussion. Now, you might think that meta discussion should happen on the per-site meta, and that is somewhat true, but it also happens via comments and we want it to happen via comments and, in fact, some network-wide policies invoke this use case. Consider the following:

Hi and welcome to Foo SE! We're a bit different from your typical forum; you may want to visit the [help] and take the two-minute [tour] to learn a bit more about our idiosyncracies. (specific guidance on issues in this post if any). (complement about common newbie problems averted in this post if any). Good luck, and I hope to see you around!

This sort of comment is ubiquitous across all the stacks I frequent, and certainly seems like an important part of increasing new-user retention with no cost to site quality; other users seeing the comment get the useful information that this is someone's first post here, which may explain/reveal/highlight various non-content-based problems with a post, as well as the information that this user has been greeted and directed to the appropriate new-user resources, and thus no further action on that count is needed. It saves everyone a lot of time, and generally makes stuff better.

Ok, so maybe you're willing to lose a little new-user friendliness in the hopes that it's a net positive overall, since the 'comment' name is pretty misleading. Let's consider this next case:

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because Bar.

This sort of comment is, in-fact, auto-generated by the system when a user casts a custom close vote. This is not a request for clarification, not a suggestion for improvement, this is an explanation as part of meta discussion. This communicates "Bar is not allowed here" to the user. If it's controversial, someone else may say "Actually, Bar is allowed here" and then it goes to meta for a proper discussion. But that sort of basic "This is what you're doing wrong. This is the process/etiquette issue you are running into here" comment is helpful and appropriate and would be occluded in the new phrasing.

Next:

meta [here](foo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314159/is-bar-on-topic-or-not)

This directs people who want to argue for or against topicality to the appropriate place for that. Several other sorts of meta links can occasionally be appropriate, for example on discussing why we want to leave a really terrible answer or something like that (although ofttimes we just get a mod comment explaining a why on that instead).

Next:

Comments are not for extended discussion, this conversation has been moved to [chat](chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/11/a-comment-discussion-got-moved-here).

Mods often leave comments explaining site violations when a group of users are guilty of something. Like, if a whole bunch of answerers keep doing the same not-okay thing and getting their answer deleted, and they aren't all new, then a mod comment linking to [GS/BS] or [Be Nice] or [Back It Up!] may be appropriate. Public comments are one of the ways diamond mods communicate with the communities they govern and while I would hope all the diamond mods would be well-versed enough not to be majorly affected by a parlance change, I think users may respond to such comments less well (since it's less clear what's going on) or may rapidly learn to ignore your 'suggestion' text (since it quickly becomes clear that that's not actually intended to be a rule about what comments are for, since the leadership violates said rule willy nilly). This is, of course, bad.

And the last major meta-discussion use case is:

[Related](link): This question as relates to a previous version of FooBar.

Which provides context for users.

So basically, I like the idea, but it needs to be phrased to allow this stuff too. Not sure of any good word for that.

Answer 5

The proposal is based on a faulty premise

Yes, there's a general problem with misuse/overuse of comments. However, the suggested solution excludes legitimate and necessary uses of comments.

Comments actually have two primary use cases

That is the premise of this proposal and it is sort of technically true, but not in a way that supports the suggested solution. The existence of those two primary use cases does not mean that those are the only intended or appropriate use cases. As Thomas Owens' answer points out, that interpretation directly contradicts the guidance on the help/privileges/comment page, and excludes the intended purpose of adding relevant but minor or transient information to a post.

Excluded appropriate content and its impact

Restricting comments as suggested would encourage non-answers and low quality answers. Particularly on the computer-related sites, there is a variety of information that is appropriate to post, but not as an answer. A few examples:

• helpful links, especially if they do not contain an actual or complete answer
• diagnostic suggestions (unless the proposal here is to artificially shoehorn them into a request for clarification or suggested improvement with wording like "have you tried..." or "your question would be better if you include the result of XYZ test")
• speculative solutions that, if successful, would be only a lucky guess (You could argue that this should be posted as an answer. If it was, it might not qualify for deletion as "not an answer", but we explicitly discourage the posting of such low quality answers. If it turns out to be the solution, it can be expanded into a proper answer. Excluding them from comments would move the cleanup effort from comments to answers.)
• speculative edits, such as expansion of an answer that goes beyond the original author's scope but doesn't qualify as a stand-alone answer. The author could choose to add it, in which case the comment could subsequently be deleted.
• information by the post author that is useful but tangential or provides clarification needed by only a very limited audience, and would make the post excessively long or would be distracting if included.

Let me point out that some of the discussion I see about things that shouldn't be in comments ignores the definition of a comment as holding transient information. The argument goes that something suggested or raised in a comment should be acted upon and then the comment deleted. That is used as justification for the content not being in a comment at all. But that is precisely a contemplated use for transient information. Until the information in the comment is acted on, that is exactly where it should be.

The hole comments fill

This list is by no means comprehensive. We have standards and guidance for what makes a good question and a good answer. There is other stuff that is appropriate and important to post here in relation to questions and answers.

The current option is comments, which by default, tend to assume the definition of "anything that doesn't qualify as question or answer content". As such, a lot of stuff is posted in comments that shouldn't be posted at all, and yes, we could use a solution for that problem.

But I think overly restricting comments, especially contrary to our published definitions of their appropriate use, will do more harm than good, degrading question and answer quality by moving content there that is inappropriate or ill-suited for those posts.

Focusing for a moment just on content that is appropriate for posting (i.e., ignoring the chit chat, gossip, and similar stuff that doesn't belong at all), the vast majority of what I see in comments is in the best place for it.

Questions and answers are the site content and the focus should be on making those the highest possible quality. Comments exist to support the questions and answers. If there's going to be stuff posted that doesn't qualify as desirable question or answer content, and it inevitably will be, it's preferable that it be posted in comments rather than in questions and answers. Comment cleanup is much simpler than than the question and answer cleanup process.

Processes that are contrary to users' instincts

We also need to recognize that the Stack Exchange doesn't exist in a vacuum. The vast majority of posters are conditioned by their experience everywhere else. To the extent possible, the site structure should seem natural and easily understandable to users. We see inappropriate posting because that's what seems natural to a lot of users. I'm not saying we should turn SE into a forum or change our standards. Rather that the best compliance and the least cleanup will result from, where practical, doing things in a way that is consistent with what seems natural to users rather than contrary to their instincts.

If you look at the comment threads on other answers and at other Meta questions, there are also major differences of opinion on many things SE -- the appropriate nature of edits, whether certain content should be in a comment or an answer, etc. The SE philosophy is to purposely leave most such things loosely defined and subject to community culture. It provides the flexibility for users to work in a way that feels natural and comfortable within a general framework, rather than a rigid, one-size-fits-all collection of rules.

That approach fosters participation and contribution. Many people have strongly held opinions on how these things should work, but the issues will never be resolved, nor should they be; they aren't governed by singular rules that operate to the exclusion of all others. SE is successful because it accommodates this range of approaches and ideas, they aren't a problem to solve. That's why there's vanilla and chocolate ice cream.

Half-serious alternative

Along those lines, I'll toss in a half-serious alternative that illustrates how to mitigate the problem in a way that is consistent with people's instincts: add a different type of comment. Reserve "regular" comments for content that is appropriate to be on the site (as defined on the help/privileges/comment page). Create a new type of post that is explicitly identified as a temporary, disposable post. Those would be automatically discarded after a short period (say 24 hours) unless the author of the post it is attached to (perhaps and/or a high-rep user), accepts it for conversion to a normal comment.

We might even allow users with <20 rep to post those as a harmless alternative to their posting non-answers just because they have the "need to post". Users >20 rep could use those for content that only needs to be temporary, including jokes, chit chat, etc., that they need to get out of their system. Of course inappropriate content would be subject to immediate deletion. We could even have filters to automatically delete ones that contain inappropriate language. It would cut way down on the cleanup required for both comments and answers.

Answer 6

I like the general idea, but I don't think it's quite there.

The help/privileges/comment page gives three reasons to leave a comment: request clarification, leave constructive criticism, or add relevant but minor or transient information to a post. I believe that all three of these are valid for both questions and answers.

Some specific examples:

• I write an answer that points out flaws with another user's answer. It may not be possible to point out the problems in a comment, but you do want to (1) ping the author to let them know and (2) let users know that there are some problems and that another post does address concerns.
• I leave a link to a related question or answer. This could be on the same site or a different site. Leaving a link in a comment also has it appear on the "Linked" section of the sidebar. Perhaps there's also some UX changes to be made here - making "Related" and "Linked" questions more visible, being able to manually "Link" questions without leaving a link in a post or comment.

Also, I'd like to point out that he Help Center explicitly says that comments should not be used to suggest corrections that don't fundamentally change the answer. The proposed change would be in direct contradiction on questions.

Answer 7

I neither agree nor disagree with this idea

Suggest improvements is a good word to stay away from the Thanks, Works for me . I have the same problem too, Oh man you're a life saver comments.

But it will become confusing for people when

A similar question is asked previously but not exact duplicate. So it can't be closed. We want to redirect the OP to that question . in such case, people comment

A similar question is asked previously. you can refer to this solution [link to solution]

It is neither an improvement suggestion nor a clarification request.

So the word Suggest improvement become confusing in that case.

A suggestion

At present, if the number of comments under a post is too large, then only it will show Comments are not for extended discussion. and an option to move to chat.

Show that always for an answer so that if OP need some clarification, they can start a chat thread.

the only problem with this is it will affect <20 rep users.

but to comment, people need 50 rep(not for own post) So it won't make a big problem

Answer 8

Comments at Area 51 are decidedly less structured than at the larger exchanges, such as Stack Overflow.

At Stack Overflow, the main plague goes in waves, often remedied by a single flag removal rule (such as when accept rate comments used to be a thing). Right now, there is still the common approach of using "what have you tried?". Is this not "requesting clarification"?

I don't think that this would be much of an improvement at Stack Overflow, or at the larger exchanges. It could cause severe problems with users who review as well, as their comments are not in the form of requesting clarification or suggesting improvement, but in the form of critiquing and informing the user of some type of issue.

Since those review comments, and this is just one issue to highlight, would no longer be requesting improvements, would they then be subject to flagging as no longer needed? That would constitute a massive addition to the flag queue, directly impacting the area you are seeking to remedy.

I would suggest focusing on a different aspect of comments, or perhaps going more in depth with what actual problem comments face on larger exchanges. It is good that Area 51 worked out well, but that is a different scenario.

Answer 9

Suggesting an improvement of an answer creates a perfect environment for help vampires.

While suggesting an improvement may be good in theory, in action it will play into Chameleon Questions. If the user edits their main question once properly answered to increase its scope, there is now the guidance to suggest an improvement from the answerer.

Overall, this scenario can be legitimate when an actual clarification took place in the question which highlighted the issue, but often it is simply the author attempting to get more out of their question by editing in more and more code sections to get more and more donation of work.

And of course it's not the end. Now maybe the error is gone, but it's not doing what it's supposed to. If you're anything like me, your patience is now starting to wear thin. It's lousy code and you didn't volunteer to help him rewrite his whole app. And of course, the question still only has 12 views, and nobody has upvoted either the question or your answer, including the person you're helping, so this is turning out to be a genuinely thankless task in all respects. Welcome to "Family Tech Support", Web 2.0 Edition. -Aarobot