Comment removal and subsequent flow of discussion issue

Question

Over the years (and there have been several of them), I have noticed an issue with comment moderation and the subsequent flow of discussion in the comments, and its getting worse.

Its really really annoying to come across relevant discussion in comments where you have replies to someone but you cannot see the original comment being replied to - this can have huge knock on effects, as you have to assume some context from the replies, which means assuming that the replies are correct.

Having had a similar issue with one of my own comments today (it simply disappeared overnight, but replies to it still exist without any context at all, and its not obvious what my comment was), this raises another issue - why was I not notified that my comment was removed? Did someone have an issue with it? etc etc etc

This is a problem across all of the SE sites I am active on, and as I noted above its only getting worse - has anyone else noticed this?

Answer 1

The usual solution to long comment threads is to remove those that have either been answered and solved, or those that have been incorporated into the question/answer.

If that will impact follow up comments, the best solution (if those comments are valuable) is to move the whole lot to a specific chat room.

As regards your comment re notification, comments are second class citizens here. They are for requesting clarity or updates etc., and in general should be dealt with or incorporated. Then they should be removed to make it easier to read the question and answers. I for one would hate to be notified every time something changed on a comment - if there is a post I am interested in then I watch it anyway. Extra noise is even less welcome...

A lot of my moderation is around removing comment threads (that may be 40 comments long or more) because they make it so difficult for community to read the actual valuable content.