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This message would almost make sense to me except for the fact that chat discussions are hid by default and you must click show all.

I'm revisiting this but did not find any explanation of what harm hidden chats are doing in that thread.

To reiterate old gripes, 95% of the time I've seen this I've ignored it. The discussions are always about the answer or question at hand. Happens a bit more often on meta especially in the case of explaining reasoning behind policy to a new user. To be fair I always consider the suggestion, before thinking, "No, that's stupid."

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    Yeah I don't really think it's working. We recently deleted a 399-comment thread that could have easily passed off as a Skype conversation.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 16:47
  • @BoltClock'saUnicorn So how's your day going BoltClock?
    – Servy
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 16:48
  • @BoltClock'saUnicorn I guess I could have flipped this into "users ignore this message since it seems pointless to them" and taken the other side with the exact same logic.
    – djechlin
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 16:48
  • @Servy: It's not even an hour into Wednesday and I can already tell it's going to suck.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 16:49
  • I think we should have a Skype convo to prove OP right/wrong..
    – Med
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 19:02

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I've seen a lot of long comment threads that aren't about improving the post. Some of them aren't even about the topic of the site after a while. It's possible that this behavior is site-specific. (I see it a lot on the more "subjective" sites, in particular.)

A reader should be able to read through the comments that are about the post (even if numerous and behind a "show N comments") link, but too much junk mixed in there deters readers. It also makes work for moderators, who are the only ones (other than the authors) who can delete comments -- which we can only do one at a time or by flushing everything.

Experienced users may tune out the warning, but I believe it does deter some newer users (who want to do what's right but don't know what that is), and the cost of having that message is pretty low.

So I think the current behavior is fine.

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