Hiding controversial comments disrupts the flow of the discussion

Question

SE hides comments with low or no upvotes in long discussions to prevent the comment section below a post from getting too long and the user having to scroll to see the next post.

This is usually a good idea, given that many comments do get ignored and just don't deserve as much attention as other comments in the thread. There's no point of including them in the default view.

However, some comments don't get upvotes because the majority of the community does not agree with them. These kinds of comments would probably get downvotes, if it were possible.

Comments like these will typically be part of a debate and be followed by a reply that has tens or hundreds of upvotes. However, because they have fewer upvotes than the other comments, they're hidden and the replier seems to be replying to nothing. In order to find out what the reply was about, you need to scroll to the bottom of the post and click on View All Comments.

I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with removing comments that violate guidelines. (therefore, this question is not a dupe of Comment removal and subsequent flow of discussion issue). However, if it's just a disagreement, then hiding these comments can actually require more scrolling for the reader, and not less.

I know this is a minor issue, but it still warrants improvement.

Answer 1

This feature requests seems to misguided. Let me start by critiquing the main premise: You cannot really show all comments always.

There are some huge comment chains and if all of them were visible on all pages at all times, that would detract from the user experience.

Moreover, it would detract from the real content on the page. The one the network has been built around: questions and answers. Comments have always been second-class citizens and have never been supposed to be the focus of a page.

So, hiding some comments makes sense. They are ephemeral anyway and should never be the main thing to look at.

Maybe hiding lower-scored comments (thus leaving gaps in conversations) is not optimal from information presentation perspective. However, the alternative is not really to show them all.

Since you need to hide at least some, there should be a judgement call which ones. Maybe all comments. Maybe just show the first N comments then hide the rest. Or the last N. Or maybe other criteria. Whatever happens, you always end up with some threads partly hidden and a way to show all comments.

I also cannot really accept that hiding comments is somehow confusing for users. I believe that users who have enough sense to look at the comment section also have enough sense to know to expand it to show everything. If they are interested in following it. It is not rocket science. It is, in fact, a very regular and ubiquitous feature all around the web to collapse comment chains.

Lastly, even the actual proposed "fix" is inadequate:

Only comments whose author is not mentioned in the following comments should be hidden.

Not all comments that are part of the same conversation are linked by mentions. Two trivial examples:

1. User A comments, user B comments in relation to their comment immediately after. But without @-mentioning them. According to the "Only comments whose author is not mentioned in the following comments should be hidden." one or both of these can be hidden.

   A: Bananas are actually yellow
   B: Bananas can also be green in colour, when not fully ripe

2. Multipart comments are also used. Again, according to the proposed fix one or more parts of the same multipart comment can be hidden because typically only the first comment uses @-mention:

   C: @A here is a very long description of banana colours including (1/3)
   links and materials and other information (2/3)
   that makes it too long to fit in one comment (3/3)

3. User A can leave multiple comments but anybody using @A is not replying to a concrete one. There can be multiple conversations going. According to the proposed fix all of user A's comments will be shown, regardless of which conversation that is in. Or if there even is a conversation.

   A: @B oh, thanks, didn't consider unripe fruit [reply to a previous conversation] A: OP, can you clarify X and Y? [unrelated] D: @A "didn't consider unripe fruit" - also overripe bananas will be brown or even black [relates to the previous comment chain]

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I know this is a minor thing, but it's also an easy fix.

It is neither easy, nor a fix, as I demonstrated. There is no magical algorithm to compose comment chains together. I use a userscript that attempts to organise comment chains together which does mostly rely on @-metions (well, the rules for which participant in the comment thread is pinked by a subsequent comment). While it works most of the time, it does not work all of the time. I have outlined the frequent failure points above. And the thing is - they usually happen in long and convoluted comment threads anyway. Short ones (with few collapsed comments in them) are generally OK and easy to follow. If this feature requests intends to address longer and more involved comment chains, then relying on @-mentions is provably not enough.

There is no magic algorithm that allows you to to compose comment chains such as they are always 100% useful. And users are expected to understand how reading comments works. I see no issue in hiding parts of conversation. Sure, it means you cannot get the entire thing without expanding. But that is par for the course.

The only real "improvement" that can be done is re-doing the comment system to natively support threads. And maybe having a user setting to always show them expanded. Yet, that is not what the feature requests here asks for. It asks for something not solving the issue of reading long comment threads with a value proposition that seems to be "close to zero users are affected by collapsed comment threads, therefore we should make it worse for literally everybody else to read and interact with the page by expanding already long threads to be even longer".

Answer 2

SE isn't really meant for discussion and debate. They're useful for clarification but past a point are a distraction. Comments don't ever get "tens or hundreds" of upvotes in most cases. Posts rarely get that many votes.

If there's an important and pertinent point it belongs in a question or answer.

I'd also note, ideally and potentially these comments can be deleted once they're no longer of use. Comments are generally not important enough to downvote. The closest equivalent to that is a no longer needed flag.

While it seems minor, I feel like the proposal ignores the expected usage of comments and elevates it past the level of importance it ought to have. Worse, it normalises long comment threads.

Answer 3

My understanding has always been that one should always assume comments might be deleted at any given time.

Comments have always felt like an add-on to me. They're not there for answers (ANSWERS are there for answers). They're also not for discussion, because stacks aren't discussion sites. They're question and answer sites, and as such, questions and answers are the main units of communication here.

Comments are often used to solicit more detail or to ask for clarification. That's fine -- but the responses to these solicitations should never be by way of more comments -- they should be handled by edits to the questions that add the info that was asked for. This is because comments are never guaranteed to not disappear without notice. They might disappear because of real reasons, or they could even conceivably go away because SE decided to remove comments from the platform completely.

As to mods deleting comments -- they do this for a variety of reasons. Mostly, they seem to do it because of violations to our "be nice" policy. If something violates that policy, moderators might delete it whether it has zero ups or a million ups. My guess is that they don't consider the ups at all when making such decisions.