Why was "my eyes are bleeding" removed from my comment?

Question

Today I viewed this question which seemed appealing. But once viewed the PHP code I began to cry like there was no tomorrow. The code made use of __get and __set magical method in a situation where the was no real need and made it somehow recursive to the point that even the PHP error message didn't make much sense.

I've hardly seen a code worse than that one in at least 3 months, so my first reaction was to comment with:

My eyes are bleeding.

After a while I came back to the question and noticed that my comment was gone. I thought about it and understood why it was deleted: it was not constructive (even though I'm most certainly positive I've seen exceptions to this rule multiple times). And I totally agree with that action.

So I reposted my comment in the form of:

My eyes are bleeding. No, but seriously: [about 3 lines of comment explaining why he shouldn't have used __set and __get in the first place].

So that it contained an hint on how bad that code is and the explanation as to why.

Surprisingly enough I was linked back to that question and noticed that my comment was edited: the first part was completely removed leaving the comment as:

Seriously: [about 3 lines of comment explaining why he shouldn't have used __set and __get in the first place].

Here's my question: is this considered going too far into "fixing" comments? Should I avoid anything that is not extremely constructive (if so, should I flag every "Thanks" or "RTFM" comments as well as variation of "My eyes are bleeding", "My brain hurts" and such?)?

Answer 1

So this is a tough one. There are two issues here at play, highlighted by a comment made by Adam Rackis:

Any hints of personality are being removed from Stack Overflow. This is sad.

First, these "My eyes are bleeding" and "My head hurts reading your code" and "I want to poke my eyes out" type comments are all old and tired. Part of personality is coming up with something new every once in awhile, but that's a different issue altogether.

Before I address your issue, let me begin with this: We don't want Stack Overflow to be humorless. Most of us can agree with that. But humor isn't why we're here. You probably allow humor in your workplace too, but again, it's not why you're there. Humor must never be the primary goal or we fail in our mission.

So knowing that humor is okay, the problem in this case is that you drew unnecessary attention to yourself with your first comment, which provided absolutely no value whatsoever and only seemed to exist so you could take a stab at the asker's lack of PHP knowledge. On a site that exists to help people learn and solve problems, there really isn't a place for that type of "personality".

Now, your second comment was also removed. It contained the same eye bleeding material from the first comment. At that point, you already drew negative attention to yourself. You made it clear that the only reason you're posting your comment is to make that eye bleeding statement stick, to just try to be funny. This makes your second comment seem less genuine and authentic. The part about helping the asker by explaining what was wrong, well, it would seem that you only did that to prevent what you considered the more important part from getting deleted, the part where you announce that your eyes are bleeding.

Consider that if you had made your comment with the intention of helping the asker, you would probably still have been able to inject a little sarcastic humor along with it and let the asker know that you're blinded by the low quality code he or she posted. In other words, you would have been able to say "my eyes are bleeding" and chances are no one would have though otherwise. Most of us have injected some sarcasm or humor in our comments, including me, but it isn't our primary reason for posting them.

It's debatable whether or not the comment in its second form should have been left as-is, but again, we keep coming back to the question of why you are here. If your only purpose in commenting is to make a funny, then you're in the wrong place, but if you happen to make a funny while also providing professional value, then that's probably okay.

Keep in mind many people use this site in their daily work. It's a professional resource used by professional people. Sure, some humor is okay, but think of Stack Overflow like you would your job and everything should work out. The moderators should keep doing what they do acting as exception handlers taking care of bigger issues, and the community shouldn't feel like it's being overly censored. Everybody wins.