Moving comments to chat: is it just about length?

Question

Over time, I've noticed an increasing practice among moderators of the smaller sites (i.e. not in the Trilogy) to move extended comment chains to chat, just because they're too long.

Is this a good idea?

In the past, I've taken the position on many occasions that I believe that comments serve two purposes only: clarification, and asking for clarification. I take this position because as a mod I want the freedom to purge a comment trail that is clearly running off the rails without having to argue with anyone about politeness definitions.

But that's not the same thing as two pedantic C++ language lawyers debating the finer points of "undefined behavior." I give wide latitude to such discussions, as long as the participants don't start throwing spears, because I believe they are instructive.

The SE software even has accommodations for this. Long comment chains are automatically collapsed, so as not to disrupt the Q&A format of the post. And moving a comment chain to chat is not even a move, really; to do an actual move, you have to perform the conversion, and then delete all of the copied comments from the post.

Here is a recent example:

Is the use of the term "bugged" to refer to software bugs in English a worldwide or regional use?

and it's accompanying chat room.

What I find amusing is that the OP's detailed POV about the term, where he floats a theory about why everyone thinks that "bugged" is not a thing (that conversation took place in the comments, and is now safely sequestered in the chat room) gets to stay prominently featured in his question, at the very top of the post.

Now you could argue that the chat room is a better environment to have these discussions anyway, and you'd be right. I could argue that if we're going to do that, then why not just automatically convert long discussions to chat rooms?

The problem is not so much where the comments reside. I don't understand why mods are taking it on themselves to fix something that isn't hurting the site (at least in my opinion). In addition, every time I see this happen, the participants in the conversation immediately lose interest in it. The only comment that was posted in that room after all the comments were moved is most likely this one:

It wouldn't surprise me if the folks using "bugged" to refer to a certain software quality are the same folks who refer to their programs as "codes" and who believe textspeak is the pinnacle of modern English.

Which nobody will ever see. :)

Some mods are really aggressive about this. I discussed this with a mod on Physics, and he told me that they routinely move discussions when they think they might run off the rails.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell moving comments to chat is "just" about discussion. It may be interesting and useful but it distracts readers from questions and answers when presented within the "main UI".

Since you mention collapsing comments chains, I've seen many times how this works and honestly this looks like a heavily compromised approach.

In lucky few cases it works all right and comments upvotes manage to pop up worthy key points but mostly what gets visible looks like random messy bits and doesn't even trigger curiosity to expand the whole chain. Allowing downvotes to comments could probably somewhat help in that... or maybe not - and there is a risk that it could become cure worse than decease, by further diluting the Stack Exchange brand of question and answer sites.

And there's that thing about collapsed comments chains that nothing can fix - it's when you expand them. It is actually the moment when it becomes apparent how bad they fit into UI. Watching and following 30... 40... 100 comments exploded in the middle of Q&A UI is a pain in the neck. These small fonts, that plain text where normal chat would have neat oneboxes, this absence of references to replied-to messages, these useless timestamps. These warnings that pop up when you want to add your comment, "move to chat?"

And other answers around, and sidebar that eats screen estate and distracts you from reading the discussion. And broken flow - when you are done with reading comments and want to get back to questions and answers and you're like have to start it all over again as if you landed on a different page than what you started reading a while ago.

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To me moving to chat makes a good solution for above issues. You get to a different page than Q&A, it is much better equipped to host a discussion and there's no brain-damaging collapse-expand stuff, everything is just so much more convenient. I recently started reading and posting to such chat rooms and I really like it so much more than commenting. Comments UI (unlike that of chat) is simply bad fit for discussions and I don't think this will ever change.

The main problem with comments moved to chat as I see it that this is a relatively recent feature and people are still learning how to use it right. That immediate loss of the interest you mention, it's one of the symptoms. People still have to learn that move is not to shut down the discussion but to give it a more appropriate media. And system is still to be tweaked to help them see that.

Take for example these canned messages "comments archived", "comments are not for extended discussion, the conversation has moved to chat" - while formally correct, these read like "we moved this shit away. Nothing to see there, move along". When I want to vote them up to tell that chat room is useful, what signal do I send to readers? That I agree with removal of comments or that I want people to follow this link?

• System probably needs a way to "promote" worthy chat rooms and help readers see them. "Here is an important discussion related to this post, follow this link to find it".

But how this could be done?

It looks tempting to pass this weight to moderators and tell them to tweak these messages when needed. But if you think of it, this won't scale because there is no way for moderators to be able to study all the chat rooms and tell which are worthy of being promoted like that and which are not.

Another seemingly easy solution (that unfortunately won't work) is to make that chat room promotion dependent on upvotes to the comments announcing the move. The problem with this is of course that system can't really tell whether upvote means that chat room is worth visiting or support the idea to move useless chatter away, "Nothing to see there, move along". And this is hardly a minor problem - for example, about 90% of my upvotes to such announcements are exactly to support moving of useless shit away.

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Summing up, it seems to be a move in the right direction to "export" comments discussions to chat but this feature is not yet mature and system needs some changes to get it right. And of course people need to get used to it and learn how to leverage it (the latter seems unfortunately too hard with the way how it is currently implemented, "Nothing to see there, move along").

Answer 2

My position: yes, it is - or rather, it can be (depending on site) - a good idea to aggressively delete comment chains.

Given that these are Q&A sites, and the focus should be questions and answers, comments can be actively harmful. I've seen instances of people believing that comments were answers, or attaching more importance to comments on the question than to actual answers because the question comments appear higher on the page. I've seen people post answers as comments in order to avoid exposing themselves to downvotes, or to try to make their own response more prominent than that expressed in the answers. I've also seen many arguments break out in comment discussions. Of course, that's not really a problem with comments themselves, it's a problem with the attitudes of the people posting them, but still, the back-and-forth format of comments makes it easier for arguments to develop. (None of these issues are helped by comment collapsing.)

You have a good point that discussions between C++ language lawyers on the fine points of "undefined behavior", or the equivalent in another field, are instructive. If they are instructive enough to be a useful part of an answer to the original question, then they can (and should) be edited into that question. But otherwise, they don't really need to be on the site - or at least, they don't need to stay. Back-and-forth discussions are exactly the sort of content visitors to SE sites shouldn't have to sift through to get to their answers; this is the whole reason Stack Overflow was invented in the first place.

Answer 3

Sometimes it's about an attractive nuisance. On one of my chattier sites, it's not just that posts get lots of comments, and it's not just that the snarky ones are the ones that are "above the fold" because people vote on snark, and it's not just that four people are having a conversation involving 15+ comments and completely burying those two comments asking the OP for clarification. It's also that these kinds of threads invite more people to join in (especially if there's upvoted snark to draw them in), people start arguing with each other, the tone starts to degrade, and it all feeds on itself. (And now those requests for clarification are two of 50+ comments and doomed to not be seen.) And remember, none of this is threaded the way chat is, so we see a fair bit of cross-talk due to confusion about who's responding to whom.

Sometimes threads like this get purged, but when there are people trying to have a productive discussion (in and around the other stuff), moving it to chat instead of just nuking it is friendlier.