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Earlier today I posted an answer to this question.

The first comment to my answer was an explanation of the one down vote it got. Following was discussion regarding the validity of that persons reason for down voting. Now, all of these comments (including some of which were my own) appear to have been deleted.

Although his reasoning for giving the answer -1 was rather thin in my (and several others) opinion, nothing in the discussion (at least the first 7-8 comments that I was aware of) was in any way offensive or anything.

Could some moderator perhaps explain this? Especially since one comment was an explanation for the down vote, it is kind of clarifying that it remains visible.

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    An offensive comment is not the only type of comment that would be removed - there is also not constructive / off-topic, obsolete, too chatty... No comments that fall under these categories should be left on a post. Perhaps the downvote discussion was interpreted as "too chatty".
    – Lix
    Mar 27, 2012 at 9:28

1 Answer 1

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If the comments were not explaining/discussing the content of your post then I'm afraid those comments were just creating "noise" on the post.

The question and answer pairs are meant to assist someone facing the same problem. I doubt (under normal circumstances) that comments dealing with anything else other than the technical validity of the post would be helpful.

No one is required to explain a down or up vote - I'm not saying that it is a bad thing to explain your voting decisions but engaging in a comment debate about someone else's
decision is simply not needed :

...discussion regarding the validity of that persons reason for down voting.

I believe this is why someone removed your comment discussion.

Looking at your answer I believe one possible reason for a downvote is that there is no explanation of the code you posted.
As I'm sure you are aware - your answer is now at +8 - a couple votes short of a Nice Answer so a comment explaining a downvote IMO is already noise - it is considered a good answer - but there will always be someone who disagrees for some reason.

Comments should only exist to help understand the content of the post. If additional crucial information is discovered within a comment discussion then that info should be edited into the OP.

Comment threads containing

  • "Thanks!"
  • "This worked!"
  • "-1 for no free hand red circles"
  • "Please work on your accept rate"
  • "Why the downvotes?"
  • "Check out my cool new site! https://www.whocares.com"

will not assist someone visiting that post 2 months down the line.

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  • Good answer, +1. And I see your point, both regarding not having to explain ones down votes and what could be considered noise in a discussion. You are however a bit off when guessing the reason for the down vote: in this specific case, the down voter's comment was something in the line of "-1: messy code". A later comment reviled that he didn't like the double negations, and would have preferred boolValue == false over !boolValue. I have no problem taking a couple of down votes, but I believe his comments added at least some value/explanation (even though I personally disagree with it).
    – Julian
    Mar 27, 2012 at 9:43
  • Yes - I can see how some people might prefer to stay away from syntax like that... If the initial comment was to suggest an alternative instead of just saying Me no likey then perhaps that comment would have been left alone :) However it seems that that suggestion happened too far into the thread and could not be salvaged...
    – Lix
    Mar 27, 2012 at 9:46
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    -1 for no free hand red circles
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Mar 27, 2012 at 18:13
  • @ThE - my humble apologies - this is the best I could do at such short notice :P
    – Lix
    Mar 27, 2012 at 18:18

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