Dealing with the weeds that are comments on Stack Overflow

Question

Comments are impermanent. They've always been meant to be. The problem is, unless a moderator goes through a question and physically deletes the comments, they're pretty permanent.

Why is this a problem?

Comments distract from their parent post. Often, comments contain information that is better suited to be in the post itself, or better suited to take place somewhere where extended discussion is welcome.

Comments are almost always a point in time blurb. They don't have the edit history of a post, and they don't flow logically as a post might. They are purposefully unstructured.

In short, comments are weeds that grow up around the useful questions and answers, and because it is impossible to prune them sanely through any human means, they proliferate, and cause a user to have to read not only the answer, but all of its comments, and attempt to parse out the relevant points from the non-relevant ones.

Yet, by default they are permanent, insofar as they remain around unless deleted by a moderator (or flagged often enough that they're deleted by the Community user)

This should change.

Comments are meant to ask for clarification, or to address points that are meta to the post itself: whether it should be closed, re-opened, or deleted.

Once that clarification is received, it's always better to put it somewhere where it will be seen by a googler: into the relevant post (either the question or the answer the comment seeks clarification on).

Feature Request

Comments should be auto-deleted after a period of time (a year is a good starting point for discussion), and this should be communicated to those that leave comments in a non-obtrusive way. This non-obtrusive message should be shown to the user the first time they leave a comment.

Part and parcel to this is an appropriate merging of the third place with a post. If people want to chat about a question, the third place should automatically set up a link to the question so that people can chat there. I recommend a 'chat' link right next to the 'edit' link for users that have the ability to chat.

If you disagree with this feature request, then please share posts where a comment was left years ago that is relevant and useful now, but shouldn't be 1) its own answer, 2) its own question, 3) an edit to an existing answer or 4) an edit to an existing question.

This related question talks about a user being able to set an expiration date on comments. Another older feature request asks for very much the same thing. I'm not asking for such complexity. All I'm asking for is that all comments are deleted after 1 year.

Please note: This feature request is primarily for Stack Overflow. We see thousands of new posts a day, with the potential for tens of thousands of comments a day. There is no level of flagging that could even come close to dealing with the number of irrelevant comments lying around. Even if there were enough flagging, there aren't nearly enough moderators to deal with the resulting flags.

Answer 1

If you come across an obsolete comment, flag it as such. I'll often flag a whole collection that look like this:

• Could you include some code please? - somebody
• We really can't help you without any code - else
• oh sorry guys i will add it when I get home - OP
• thanks that's much better - somebody

All four of those can and should go. Not in a year, either - the minute you see them. Waiting a year to delete them would be wrong.

In contrast, comments like "actually I don't think that's possible" or "here's a related question that isn't a duplicate but might help you" (on a question) or "this answer is obsolete and does not work with the latest version" (on an answer) should NEVER be deleted and should not become answers either.

I don't see a use case: you would need a comment that no-one with flagging privileges has seen for months and months, yet it is somehow confusing people or taking up space. Just not a likely scenario for me. Far better to put your effort into encouraging people to remove their own obsolete comments and flag other people's.

Answer 2

I'd like to suggest an alternate solution.

Co-opt the review queue feature to have an "old comments evaluation" option. This would work as follows:

• Any post that is older than 1 year and has more than 2 comments is entered into the queue.

• The reviewer sees the whole comment stream and then has several action options

  • Flag individual comments (streamline flag dialogue here).
  • Vote to purge entire comment stream
  • Vote to keep comment stream

• At 5 votes to purge all comments are purged from the post

• At 3 flags on any individual comment is removed
• At 3 votes to not-purge the post is removed from the queue and cannot reenter it until the post is edited.

This allows for the users to decide when to keep comments and when to purge them and it allows for this via a mechanism that's already in place instead of relying completely on moderators to delete comments.

Note: this should be a high rep queue, maybe even 20-30k+ feature.

Answer 3

The idea that comments are always used to add information to the original post is nice, but it is also not terribly realistic. We should design such features against the real situation, not against the situation we would like to have. And in practise, there is often enough useful information in comments that isn't incorporated into the answer.

Comments have very low signal to noise compared to real answers, but that doesn't mean they are completely useless. They are still easy to ignore if you want to.

The biggest case where I think this would hurt SE are comments that point out errors or weaknesses of an answer. Not all answerers are receptive to criticism and enough won't correct their mistakes. A hostile edit of the answer by the commenter is also something that is usually not done on SE sites. Theoretically the commenter could expand this into a full answer, but that puts a much higher burden on anyone that just wants to correct a wrong answer.

There might be some value in a system that automatically hides comments after a while, but I think that actually deleting them would cause more collateral damage than it is worth. Another idea would be to show comment flags to 10k users, which would make it easier to remove truly useless comments.

Answer 4

If you disagree with my premise, then find posts where comments should stick around that are years old using one of the criteria I listed above. It's ok not to like a feature request, but without data, it's just an emotional attachment.

This comment, is IMHO, instructive, and relevant to the issue at hand but is not part of the direct answer to the users question.

It is also general, i.e. they are not likely to change the standard that anchor tags and list item tags are inline elements, any time soon. Which means that the comment isn't likely to be outdated any time soon.

I have come across tons of comments like this, that actually led me doing something different then what I had originally intended. And they were on good questions that lots of people used. They are related they are useful, they make the internet a better place but they are not exact fits to the OP's issue, however they have helped lots of other people solve issues similar to the OP's.

Isn't the goal of SE to make the internet a better place? Why delete this type of content even if it's not directly related when it has actual value?

If you would like to go through the thousands of comments like this and make questions for them and then make the comment into an answer for that question, then go for it. I would fully support you on that. But until someone wants to do that then the comments should be left alone.

Answer 5

One alternative: Make permanence opt-in via a check mark instead of default. I strongly suspect this might do the trick, as users will stop and think "Will this be useful for a long time or just until the OP incorporates it?" and this may clean up itself.

Or let post owner be able to mark a comment as "completed" and get rid of it. Many comments are to-do's for the OP (e.g. "can you post your output?") and can go away when incorporated. Would work on answers, not on lowish-quality questions.

Answer 6

I don't realistically see this to be a massive, overwhelming problem, at least not to the point where we need to go to such extremes -- extremes that don't take into account the fact that not every site is the same, not every post is the same, and not every post has received the same care from the skilled hand of an editor.

Initially, Stack Exchange intended comments to be transient, and in many ways, they are. But in other ways, they've become much more than what the founders of Stack Exchange intended. Sometimes users use your product in ways you didn't intend, and sometimes it's best to meet your users in the middle if the alternative of forcing that vision on them would prove to be harmful.

I do agree there are examples of comments on posts that I'm sure could be removed. However, in a large majority of these cases, comments are not actively harmful nor are they crippling the focus on the Q&A. While it's possible the Q&A might benefit ever so slightly from their removal, such an authoritarian, draconian, blanket removal of all comments in the system may create challenges that outweigh the perceived benefits.

We need to keep in mind that we're dealing with human beings, not robots, and while Stack Exchange is not a social network, some mild discussion is not harmful nor do we actively discourage mild discussion.

Part of the definition of a not-constructive post is that the material may lead to to extended discussion not any discussion. While extended discussion clouds and muddies posts and makes them extremely difficult to read, a few comments here and there mostly do no harm and may add additional value that could be edited into the post but for whatever reason haven't.

As a moderator on The Workplace and Project Management Stack Exchange, I believe that systematically removing every single comment for the sake of removing them would create issues in the community. These communities have made their own rules, taking into consideration the vision of Stack Exchange while still tailoring the model to fit that community's specific needs. Blanket deletion would make many users in these communities feel like we're forcibly silencing them, and I would feel the same way as a user on Stack Overflow if comments started disappearing without any human intervention.

Now, if discussions extend beyond just a few comments, and the comments are flagged, or if the system auto-flags a post which has more than 20 comments, then I'll take action and do a comment cleanup. I've also flagged long conversations on Stack Overflow for being too verbose, cluttering up the page, so I'm not against the idea of tidying up, just the idea that one-size-fits-all approaches will solve the world's problems.