
In case you were wondering, the irony of that was not lost on me.

It is the opinion of the moderation team that this change is overdue. If you have compelling arguments against it, please post an answer below. We want this to happen.

This proposal comes in the wake of the last few days/weeks, most recently culminating in quite a few posts, and a discussion around comments and their place here on meta.

I've noticed that there's quite a bit of confusion and disagreement with regards to how meta should be moderated, and in particular, how comments on meta should be moderated. And so thought that it might be best if I made this formal proposal on how I think we should move forward.

TL;DR - I propose that we moderators take a more hands-on approach with regards to meta moderation, which is a change from the established status-quo. Specifically, I propose that moderators take a more active role in outright removing derailing, snarky, and non-constructive comments. I also propose that moderators should encourage extended discussion to be moved to chat more.


Here are a few facts, as I see them (I might be wrong, call me out on it if you disagree)

  • Staff, and sometimes moderators, are reluctant to go on meta. Cited reasons are toxicity, users ganging up on "bearers of bad news", hostility.
  • Threads with 100+ comments on them are a relatively common occurrence on meta, especially with high traffic posts.
  • Comments not being a great tool for extended discussions have been deathly discussed and agreed upon.

Here are some of my observations, they aren't necessarily facts, just how I see things.

  • The people of meta are, for the most part, passionate about the site, and are genuinely interested in making the site better.
  • The people of meta want, for the most part, a constructive collaboration between the community and the company, but don't necessarily know how to make it happen, or even, they don't see it happening.

I can pinpoint two specific issues, that make discussions on meta get out of hand

  • Comments that aim at ranting or otherwise derailing the conversation. This includes but not limited to: Snarky comments about how the company won't fix the issue no matter what we say, comments focusing on other comments (and not the discussion itself), comments that attempt to branch the discussion to talk about a different issue.
  • Relevant discussion that is extended beyond what's reasonable. This one is a bit vaguer, but it's generally easy to see when comments should be moved to chat. We see chat-like behavior in comment threads all the time (comments within seconds of one another, replying to one another, etc.)

The current

The current policy of meta moderation is relatively hands-off. While overt nastiness and spam are handled by the moderators (and sometimes the community itself), discussions are generally left to their own devices, to run wild.

We rolled with this situation for quite a while now, and I don't think it was the wrong decision to make at the time it was made. However, I do think this isn't quite working out anymore.

My Proposal

I propose that moderators take a more active role in moderating meta. With rules and policies similar to what we apply to comments on the main site.

  • Off-topic comments are to be deleted.

    • If you have an issue with an implication from a comment (for example, a staff member or a moderator saying something that you think contradicts policy), please make a new meta question, and link to the original comment/post.

    • Comments that attempt to derail the conversation have no place here. No matter how well and nice they are put. Stay on topic, please.

    • Comments that primarily rant have no place here. We are aware of the frustration, this is a situation we found ourselves in and we want to extricate ourselves from. Being non-constructive does not help that goal.
  • Extended discussions are to be moved to chat.

    • Comments are there primarily for clarification of points on the primary post. If you agree/disagree with the post in question, vote on it, and optionally post an answer.
    • Chat-like behavior (rapid-fire back-and-forth comments, lots of comments in a short time) is a good indicator of when the discussion should be moved to chat.

The points above are nothing new, the proposal itself is that moderators take a more active role in enforcing these policies.

This means a few more concrete things:

  • Under this proposal, moderators will be more proactive in moderating comments, even when flags are not necessarily present. This is because meta receives much fewer flags than main, and it's a weaker signal for us to follow currently. Which leads to the next point. At the time of this writing, the meta flag queue is standing at 0. Imagine that :)
  • Under this proposal, we ask you to flag more often. Try to be objective and constructive. Do you think that a particular comment truly doesn't add anything to the discussion? Do you feel like the discussion is going too fast to reasonably follow with comments? Does this discussion generate too many comments? Please flag and let us know.

I think the current state of things are actively harmful to meta and its regular conduct. Staff members are afraid of coming here. Regular users are afraid of coming here. This situation is not OK.

Let's make meta a more professional place, with less noise and more signal. I think that we've been running hands-off like this up until now and it's time we make this change.

*forever is a very long time, in effect, even in the case this proposal does get implemented, you can always make a new meta post about it ;)

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    Could you separate your proposed solution out of the question and into an answer? I believe discussion is useful and I want to upvote it as such, but I don't believe that your solution is as useful and I don't want a vote to this post to be misunderstood as support for your proposal, especially the first bullet point. – Davy M Jul 31 '19 at 1:25
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    This does not read as a proposal for a change that is up for debate. It reads as a declaration of intent. You have the power to enforce changes that you see fit. Please, don't phrase them like "Should the mod team tighten up moderation on Meta comments?" if you already state: "It is the opinion of the moderation team that this change is overdue. ... We want this to happen." If you want to, then just do it. – k0pernikus Jul 31 '19 at 10:47
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    Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 15:12

35 Answers 35


One of the many reasons meta is so toxic is the constant censorship when people try to voice their opinions and speak their mind.

If one wants a place for constructive discussion, one does not go around and clobber opinions one does not agree with. One does not censor criticism against the company and moderators just because it makes staff and moderators uncomfortable. This censorship already happens over and over and I'm sick of it.


This is almost solely because of the countless very poorly considered ideas released recently, which only get worse with the company completely ignoring community feedback. If people get fed very bad changes over and over, protest loudly and still get ignored, they will get hostile.

Right now, everyone is upset because the site is falling apart so quickly. I thought it would be more of a drawn-out process to kill it, but all decisions made in the past 2 months are rapidly destroying everything. This upsets a whole lot of people who have contributed to the site over the years, free of charge. If you try to hush this down, people will without doubt just give up and leave.


Lots of people speaking their mind is a 100% good thing, long as it is on-topic. You don't have to read all the comments if you don't want to.


What is then? We have no tool for extended discussion. But we have lots of things that call for one, such as all the very poorly considered changes to the site that have been going on lately.


These happens because the company refuses to acknowledge that the users are upset, or even that a new feature was perhaps not as smoothly deployed as it could have been. If you meet criticism with silence, you will only keep receiving critique, but in nastier and nastier ways.


This is very good, it is called freedom of speech. We need more of that, not less of it.

So what you should do is to back off. We voted for you to moderate the site and ensure that existing policies and rules are followed, not to state them. You have no right to make statements like "the default is we will be implementing this proposal".

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    I'm glad I'm not the only who sees this as the next step towards censorship. Maybe it's time we should start saving all meta content and mirroring them off-site. – Mysticial Jul 30 '19 at 23:08
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    I've found myself taking screenshots of every good point I see made, expecting them to be deleted. It's uncomfortable. – Jeremy Jul 30 '19 at 23:12
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    Freedom of speech doesn't give anyone the privilege to act like an ass. It only means that the government which enacted that policy literally cannot arrest you for what you say, provided that it is protected speech. No such rule exists for privately held websites, and the sooner that is reconciled, the easier this becomes for you. Being constructive about your feedback is welcomed. Being snarky is not. – Makoto Jul 31 '19 at 0:10
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    @Makoto The problem is that mods don't just delete snarky comments. They delete all sort of things they just don't like, or opinions they just disagree with. Stuff that doesn't break the rules, is constructive, on topic, and polite, because it makes them look bad. And yes, well all know that SO isn't legally required to let anyone say what they want. But just because SO isn't legally obligated to hear out things they might not like to hear doesn't change the fact that it would be in their best interest to do so, and would foster a heather community. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 2:46
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    @Makoto Freedom of speech is a right some governments give to their citizens, because it's good for that community. It's also a freedom some private entities can choose to give to their communities, because it (often) makes them better. It's not something that only governments can give out. Lundin is asking SO to allow their community members the freedom to express the ideas they want to. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 2:46
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    @servy mods do not delete comments on the basis of agreement or disagreement. It’s an assertion thrown around without any basis in fact. We certainly delete non constructive, off topic, and extended discussions. It’s easier to dismiss deleting a comment by saying “there wasn’t anything wrong with what I said; they must have disagreed” than to face that no matter how wonderful you believe your comments to be, they’ll be moderated if they cross any lines; regardless of whether we personally agree or disagree with them. If you’d like to discuss this further, post a meta question and I’ll answer. – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 3:32
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    @Makoto I'll try to say this one last time. If this comment is deleted, I'll stop trying. I'd like to make it clear to the mods that I'm trying to be constructive, and I'm trying to address the topic. I think your comment is misleading. Lundin didn't ask for "the privilege to act like an ass". He isn't invoking any sort of constitutional right or law. He's merely asking for the ability to say his opinion. He thinks we need more of that, not less of that. – user773737 Jul 31 '19 at 3:36
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    @Makoto At the risk of this being an "extended discussion", why are you even invoking "being an ass" or "acting like jerks"? Lundin isn't advocating for this. It seems that you're criticizing his answer based on something he never said. This is why it's misleading. It seems like you're attacking an argument that was never made. In other words: A strawman. Nobody is advocating for the freedom to be a jerk, to be snarky, to be an ass, or anything else. So I agree, let's not muddle the discussion with false accusations. – user773737 Jul 31 '19 at 3:56
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    @MadaraUchiha Have you considered that perhaps too many rants are a symptom, not a cause? Have you considered that "treating" the symptoms by removing them, aka censoring them, aka ignoring them is doing nothing to address the underlying problem and is ultimately self-defeating? – Ian Kemp Jul 31 '19 at 11:43
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    @MadaraUchiha What you're being told (repeatedly) is that this is not how to make it better; it is how to make it worse, because it is exactly more of the sort of thing that caused the problem in the first place. No, I don't have an alternative solution. That doesn't mean this is a good one. – Lightness Races in Orbit Jul 31 '19 at 11:53
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    @GeorgeStocker So no elected official has ever been unfair or not impartial? There is no need for oversight, accountability, or any possibility of consideration for a moderator ever doing anything wrong solely because they're elected? I...don't believe that. We have oversight and accountability in other areas of moderation (i.e. closing, deletion of posts) and it shows moderators make mistakes (even if it's infrequently), and that the accountability is an important and useful feature to correct them. But it doesn't exist for comments. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 13:26
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    @GeorgeStocker Just because you've been elected as a moderator doesn't mean that the trust in your ability to moderate the site will always exist. Your views/actions may no longer align with the community because you may change and/or the community may change. I'm seeing a large disconnect between the community and some of the moderators here. You making the argument that less visibility and oversight into the actions moderators take is especially worrisome. – mason Jul 31 '19 at 13:38
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    @GeorgeStocker In all fairness, a lot of the current moderators were elected quite some time ago, and there is no natural expiry of terms, nor a way to "recall" a moderator, so everyone trusting their fair judgement is not a given, especially when the mod in question was elected so long ago that commenters here have not participated in said election. – magisch Jul 31 '19 at 13:41
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    @GeorgeStocker You can't dismiss everything that I say for not having evidence when because you've deleted the evidence in question. That's just discussing in bad faith. You're demanding something that's impossible, knowing full well that I have no recourse. That no one can possibly show that moderators are deleting comments that they shouldn't is the underlying problem here. If you want to argue that mods can be trusted to never delete things based on disagreement, rather than appropriateness can you provide evidence to support it, since you're demanding I provide evidence? – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 13:58
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    On the subject of expiry of mod terms, I've long been in favor of term limits for moderators network-wide. It could help prevent things like a mod avoiding Meta completely for 2 years and then dropping in and deleting comments en masse. For what it's worth,the site's first three elections saw fewer than 5,000 people voting, compared to approx. 30,000 in the last 6 elections each. That's absolutely not a mandate for life-time moderation. – TylerH Jul 31 '19 at 14:00

My only real concerns with this are...

  • Currently, there's little to no transparency around comment moderation. You can't see what comments of yours were deleted, and you can't even see that comments were deleted at all, regardless of rep level or anything. I could think of a few solutions to that, but that's not really relevant to this post.
  • If we're going to move comments to chat, let’s try to do it before it gets to 100+ comments and work on a solution to the fact that all comment votes are lost in migration.

Otherwise, Yes, let’s get more of the longer discussions happening in chat. Currently chat seems like a very underused feature. If you want to make a point that's going to stick around, make it a question or answer such that people can effectively react to it.

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    Chat would be a much better tool if the process of moving comments to chat weren't so haphazard. – Robert Harvey Jul 30 '19 at 19:59
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    I agree with your first point, however, I still think that allowing moderators (who are generally trusted and are easily called out on if things go wrong) to be more involved is preferable to the current situation, even with this drawback. Whether or not we get a better tool to manage comment moderation is a nice bonus, but doesn't block this proposal in my view. – Madara's Ghost Jul 30 '19 at 20:04
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    I'll sound like a broken record on this point; but comments were and are intentionally third-class citizens (to use Jeff's original phrasing). meta.stackexchange.com/a/117860/16587 If you want something to stick around and to have an audit trail around it; it really is best to put it as an answer. The reason there's not much transparency around them is because they aren't meant to stick around. – George Stocker Jul 30 '19 at 20:16
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    @GeorgeStocker Even if you accept that argument (I don't entirely), it was made in the context of the main site. As you have said, meta is not like the main site and the software isn't a great fit. Discussions are not Q&As, and it's not always as practical to pull contributions into answers. – Jeremy Jul 30 '19 at 20:18
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    I understand transparency isn't always positive, and can spark unneeded debate/responses, but... i also think the complete lack of it sows distrust in the very people handling moderation. I think it should be possible to find some way of making the deleted comments findable, while minimizing the impact it would have on the majority of the userbase (such as high rep threshold, and low visibility on the link that would show them). – Kevin B Jul 30 '19 at 20:30
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    @KevinB you can always raise a question on what comments were deleted and ask why. That's part of why meta exists; to answer those sorts of questions. We're not going to answer them in comments (though we often provide reasons why we deleted the comments in the comments as a heads up). – George Stocker Jul 30 '19 at 20:33
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    @GeorgeStocker But to ask about that, you have to know that comments were deleted in the first place, which isn't always easy even if they were your own. – John Montgomery Jul 30 '19 at 21:37
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    If we could see them, and knew why they were deleted, we wouldn't need to ask most of the time. – Kevin B Jul 30 '19 at 21:38
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    Instead of arbitrarily moving comments to chat, comments should be an entirely separate view from the very first. – StackOverthrow Jul 30 '19 at 23:42
  • @RobertHarvey Did you just make a feature request? VERBOTEN! – Ian Kemp Jul 31 '19 at 11:38
  • @KevinB Also see meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387905/… for some transparency about how this proposal will work. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 12:50
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    @GeorgeStocker Look, I agree that it is fine to get rid of most comments on main, as long as important parts are moved into answers/questions, but it shouldn't be that hard to understand that discussion on meta requires comments ATM and requires them not to be deleted on a whim. You've been told this many times, and you still come back with the same argument, with no new information. What keeps you thinking this is right? Discussion requires a back and forth, comments/chatrooms are the only ways to achieve this, chatrooms have issues that need to be addressed before they become effective. – Krupip Jul 31 '19 at 13:43
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    @GeorgeStocker Note I agree with moderation on OP post with Martijn Pieters saying Moderator note: yes, we are moderating the comments here, removing non-constructive and redundant comments.. This is the right way to handle mass redundant comments and stuff on meta. It is not what you've done very recently, and not what you are physically arguing about. – Krupip Jul 31 '19 at 13:48


This is a bad idea that leads to biased comments that may, in turn, bias the reader.

Consider this scenario that just recently happened in the comments of an answer here:

A conversation between Makoto, myself, and Martijn

Makoto made a comment on this answer, criticizing it and the Lundin's usage of "Free Speech".

I later attempted to make a comment criticizing Makoto's criticism. It was quickly deleted by Martijn. My comment was deleted as "off topic", because my comment wasn't "asking for clarification or discussing the post"

So what are we left with? One user is allowed to criticize the question, but that user's criticism cannot itself be criticized.

Criticism of criticism is apparently off-topic

Can you see how that could lead to bias?

Consider the scenario where a user criticized an answer, in a comment, by using fallacious logic or made-up statistics. That misleading comment will stay. People who don't know better will upvote that comment, raising its visibility and making it "seem" true. Other comments pointing out how wrong that first comment is will be removed for being off-topic. Thus, misinformation spreads.

If comments are "tightened up" in the manner proposed, what should one do when they see a comment spreading misinformation? Flag it? Ask a new Meta question about it? Make an answer specifically calling out that question? Edit the question to specifically refute that comment?

Seems to me like the most reasonable thing to do is just to refute the comment with another comment. Then if there's a back-and-forth, take it to chat. But under the proposed rules, this won't ever happen. The misleading comment will remain, unchallenged, forever. On the other hand, if this short exchange is allowed to happen, people can at least see that the misleading comment is disputed.

And recently, Servy has stepped into the ring to criticize the criticism:

enter image description here

Let's see if his comments get deleted too. If these comments stay, then there should be no fear of misleading comments going unchallenged, and I can delete this answer. (Or it could also mean that the mod is intentionally leaving those comments up to spite me :P) Let's find out.

To add context, here is my original comment: my original comment

I'd like to think that my comment was similar to Servy's second comment, so if mine got removed, but his doesn't, then I'd feel a bit miffed and come away feeling like I was specifically targeted.

This is also why this "tightening up" is a bad thing. Unless it's done with transparency and consistency, it can feel like arbitrariness when only you get hit, but someone else who says almost the same thing, doesn't.

I also don't think that mods want to have to suffer the extra burden of answering the new wave of "Why was my comment removed?" questions that might arise from such a tightening.


This "tightening up" could be tolerable provided...

  1. Transparency.

Users need to be able to find out what was deleted and why. Making a new Meta Question seems overkill. Mods, you don't want this extra work. Users don't want to do it either. It'll only make everyone more upset.

  1. Consistency

See also: What's the standard on which comments are moved to chat?

A user should be able to predict, based on the stated rules and with a high degree of accuracy, whether or not a comment will get deleted. This goes along with #1. It shouldn't be a surprise to someone that their comment was deleted. They shouldn't need to ask why. One moderator should not be more strict or less strict than other.

Case in point, Martijn Peters is currently absent, and has been ever since I started writing this Answer, based on the "Last seen" time in his profile. This is speculation, but comment deletions seemed to have stopped or at least slowed significantly. Was this mod the one deleting all those comments? Are other mods as strict as Martijn? Will there be a mass-deletion of comments when Martijn returns? There are a bunch of "off-topic" comments right below this answer, but they aren't getting deleted, so what gives?

(please don't delete them, I like them all very much).

EDIT: Yep, they were all deleted...

To prevent whiplash, speculation, paranoia and general negativity, we need consistency.

  1. Chat rooms are made more accessible.

I don't even know how to make a new chat room, or how to spawn a "let's take this to chat..." link. If comments are to be "tightened up", people need to know how to take things to chat. That information needs to be front and center as people adjust to the change.

  1. This "edge case" of misleading information is sufficiently handled.

You'd need to have a plan on how to handle the case where misleading information cannot be criticized without being "off topic".

  • @Houseman I added a point on meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387905/… regarding your point #4. You could take a look there and edit it again to clarify that point too. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 5:44
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    I feel like my comment there was overinterpreted. I didn't call anyone out of their name in that comment thread. I merely stated that the privilege of free speech doesn't give anyone the privilege of acting like an ass. I wasn't insinuating that anyone was acting out, and if you felt that I called you out, I apologize. I do feel like my point was demonstrated, though...having constructive discussion was welcomed here with respect to the comment stream, but anything tangential to that should have been (and seems to have been) shut down. – Makoto Jul 31 '19 at 15:19

There is lots of useful information on topics in the comments of posts. Just holding the default position that comments should generally be deleted or moved to chat (which is basically the same as deleting them, as only a tiny fraction of people go and read or participate in such chat rooms) is removing tons of useful information.

For the people that aren't interested in the "nitty gritty" of those discussions and just want to get the main headlines, they can read the posts. They can already not read the comments if they aren't interested in a more in-depth discussion of the topic.

By having moderators removing the comments that they think aren't relevant, there's just such an enormous opportunity for bias (which appears to even be the goal, at this point). If you feel that a particular discussion isn't useful to you don't read it, but that doesn't mean you should be preventing anyone else from being able to read it. If you think there's useful information in a comment that you want to have more attention, as would be given by a post, ask the author to incorporate that into a post, rather than deleting the information you claim needs more attention. That's just counter productive, as with the comments deleted the users now need to go off of their own memory to try to re-create it. After the relevant information from those comments has been incorporated into a post (whether it's a new answer, new question, etc.) then deleting the comments with that info would be merited, as that is when they've become obsolete. Not before.

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    While I agree with you, one problem with "discussions in comments" if you're coming late to the party is that it's difficult to sort out the various "discussion threads". A better tool is needed... – Cindy Meister Jul 31 '19 at 4:51
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    @CindyMeister And I'm more than open to some proposal for improvement, but deleting the comments is not the appropriate way to help people see that information. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 13:08
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    Your comments on this answer were deleted (fully deleted, not just moved to chat). And to be honest, I'm pretty pissed off about it, because it's further sweeping under the rug the moderators' positions. And at the same time it's exactly the reason that's leading me to say that we need a mechanism to recall moderators and to have oversight over their moderation actions with regards to comments. – mason Jul 31 '19 at 19:56
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    "There is lots of useful information on topics in the comments of posts": I think we should regard that as a problem. Comments should not hold important information. Isn't that what questions and answers are for? – Raedwald Aug 1 '19 at 10:45
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    @Raedwald Sure - on the main site. The main site isn't about policies. Meta is about policies, so there's necessarily going to be some debate about it. And the conversation that ensues is important. Important enough to keep around, so you can see what led to various positions and so you can gauge how popular certain viewpoints are. – mason Aug 1 '19 at 12:19


MODERATORS: Do you want {policy change}?
MODERATORS: [Use the proposed policy to handle the policy change debate anyway]

According to various posts on this page, in particular this answer, moderators have tightened up moderation on meta comments...on the discussion asking whether they should tighten up moderation on meta comments, a suggestion lacking support.

Imagine a referendum where you have to vote whether participation in subsequent referenda should cost an arm. You go there to vote, and...they tell you you need to give up an arm to vote. Is this not weird?

Coming from the Eastern Bloc I have a more realistic parallel. Imagine a show trial where the verdict is already known even before the trial starts. Now, I know it's unfair to compare Stack Overflow to communist dictatorships, because the latter pretend to be democracies.

It's possible that my perception of heavy-handed moderation on this thread is just an illusion stemming from my preconceptions and those of others. In this case all is well, although I'm surprised that this many comments evaporate on meta as part of usual conduct.

If my perception is correct: could you please wait until this meta has run its course before you start enforcing the same moderation patterns that we are currently arguing against? Or just delete the whole Q&A and post an informational question announcing the new moderation, despite whatever the people on meta might think or want.

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    Agreed. I have been deleting comments very sparingly, and only when flagged on this thread (most commonly, obsolete comments leftover from the deletion of others). Until a decision is made, moderators should act the same as they always have. – Madara's Ghost Jul 31 '19 at 11:46
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    Thank you for the perspective Andras. I have been fortunate enough to never live in a totalitarian regime, but as a student of history I know what totalitarianism looks like. And it always starts with the people in power failing the populace, which causes criticism of the people in power, which makes the people in power uncomfortable - but instead of responding to that criticism by doing better, they instead respond by suppressing it. There is only one way that ever ends. – Ian Kemp Jul 31 '19 at 11:51
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    As half my family immigrated to the US to escape much of what your speaking of, I know I'm lucky I don't know what that is like. There is, however a similar concept in the US and I do feel it is a good parallel for everything that is happening now where meta users feel they are "guilty until proven innocent". – LinkBerest Jul 31 '19 at 14:20

The problem with this proposal is that when comments are moved to chat, their votes are lost, and new votes cannot be added. This means that you can no longer see the "weight" of each opinion.

If the chat system was improved to allow votes to be cast, and also showed/hid comments based on the score, then it wouldn't degrade the functionality of the site too much.

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    I'm not that concerned about votes migrating over. People can always come into the chat room and star conversations. I'm not in favor of collapsing chat comments based on score; the whole point of moving it to chat is to get it to scale better. – Robert Harvey Jul 30 '19 at 20:29
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    But how does it scale better? If 100 comments are under the post you can glance at the most important ones easily, because the rest are hidden. I haven't used chat that much, but without the collapsing you need to read them all. – user000001 Jul 30 '19 at 20:32
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    Chat rooms are hugely more effective than comments on single posts, in almost every way that is measurable. – Robert Harvey Jul 30 '19 at 20:35
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    @RobertHarvey ...except for being visible from the post. I guess that minor consideration falls under the "almost"? :) – Heretic Monkey Jul 30 '19 at 20:42
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    That sounds like a good feature request (make chatrooms for posts more prominent) – Kevin B Jul 30 '19 at 20:43
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    @KevinB I can see it now, SO implements an iframe in place of the comments section after comments have been moved to chat with a live-updating view of the most recent 5 - 10 comments visible, maybe even with the ability to submit your own chat messages right there in the iframe. – TylerH Jul 30 '19 at 20:59
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    @RobertHarvey "Chat rooms are hugely more effective than comments on single posts, in almost every way that is measurable." I think the reverse is unquestionably the case. What's a single way in which chat is preferable for feedback on the points raised in an answer on meta? – Servy Jul 30 '19 at 21:12
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    @RobertHarvey Sure thing. 1) Comments are way more visible. Basically no one (as a percentage of readers of a post) reads chat. Moving comments to chat is basically the same as deleting it. It doesn't help the discussion of that topic, it kills it. 2) As this post describes, it destroys the useful indications of which comments are most useful 3) it's not an entirely different system of doing the same thing. People can use the software they're already here to use, rather than re-learning an entirely different UI/UX just to discuss a post. 4) You can see the post in the comments under it. – Servy Jul 30 '19 at 21:27
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    On the other hand, you can't downvote comments, so you get a skewed perspective of what their weight is. Opposing views are often deterred (who wants to paint a target on themselves being the first to take on 30 other commenters) or splintered among multiple opinions. (Starring has a similar problem.) That's one of the reasons to encourage using answers as it makes the voting more fair. How many times have you downvoted without wanting to leave a comment? – Troyen Jul 30 '19 at 22:45
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    @Servy this sounds like something material enough to form an answer. Please write one up! – Martijn Pieters Mod Jul 30 '19 at 23:20
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    @Servy If you want to have a back and forth discussion you can take it to chat. Comments are not the place for this. – Martijn Pieters Mod Jul 31 '19 at 0:22
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    @MartijnPieters I'm not having a back and forth conversation with anyone. Robert just asserted that chat is the best place to comment on a post. I asked him why, and moderators keep deleting my comments without anyone answering them. That's not a back and forth. I asked one question, and instead of an answer, have gotten people either refusing to answer or deleting my comments. Your actions right here are exactly why this proposal is unacceptable. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 2:39
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    @Servy with all due respect, this conversation should either 1) be based off a new "answer" to this meta-question, which contained all your info, is more visible, and (helpfully) isn't a comment, or 2) since it's between two people (or four, but it's a discussion, albeit a short one) it should be in chat. You could put a (single) comment on the post (for visibility) saying that "we're discussing whether and/or why chat rooms are more effective than comments. [link]. Then, once a consensus is reached, the OP could edit the post, or you could put another (single) comment on. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 3:50
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    Most don't need to see every point that people thought were important. If it's that important, it can be a separate answer. Instead, they can know that that point is/was discussed, then join the discussion if they have more to add, or disagree with the consensus. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 3:52
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    @Cullub But anyway, it makes no sense for me to post an answer to say, "Robert posted a comment asserting that Chat is better than Comments, Robert, could you explain why you think that since you didn't explain so in your comment." Such an answer would merit deletion as NAA as it's an attempt to reply to another user, not an answer to the post. Hence why I would never post such an answer. Comments exist precisely to post such things. On top of the answer meriting deletion, Robert wouldn't be notified, and so it would be even harder to respond. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 14:05

(Posting this as an answer to avoid it getting deleted by mods under this new policy)

Do you think we should consider the score of your question (a traditional, time-honored metric for Meta consensus [or lack thereof] on a proposal) as us "speaking now" on whether we think this proposal should be implemented by default or not? In other words if your question continues to stay in the negative (it's currently +8/-10), will you consider that the Community's way of saying "no"?

There are already several answers that highlight how this might not be a problem in the future, where better comment tooling, comment-migration-to-chat functionality, etc. exists, but that it would be a problem if implemented now. I'm just not sure how you expect the responses to go. Should everyone post a similar answer, or will upvotes be enough?

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    Comments are definitely where clarifications go -- that's never changed. This is a good clarifying question. – George Stocker Jul 30 '19 at 20:57
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    @GeorgeStocker Your comment is a little unclear. Are you suggesting this is good as an answer or are you suggesting it should have been posted as a comment? – TylerH Jul 30 '19 at 21:00
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    The aim of the notice up top is to say that we want actual arguments for/against here. If the post's score is ambivalent (eg. +99-100), it will not be enough to signal the moderation team that this proposal is not wanted by the community. If it gets to (and consider this an example, not a threshold) +50-300, we will reconsider. There will always be downvotes on any post that suggests a change of any kind, and we want to hear the "why", moreso on this post than others, because it is the opinion of the moderation team that this should happen. – Madara's Ghost Jul 30 '19 at 21:03
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    I don't think this is really about tooling. I think it's about moderators essentially neglecting meta. There was a period of several months where I didn't come here at all. – Robert Harvey Jul 30 '19 at 21:12
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    A structure for polls have existed in the DB since way back when, they were just never implemented. We need something way easier to consume than going through all the answers and tallying the aggregate score then looking at views to see what % of active users might have weighed in when it comes to obtaining consensus. And then test that by revisiting a question that's 4 years old and you don't even know how many users were around back then. This is one of those problems meta was never very good with. – Tim Post Mod Jul 31 '19 at 3:03
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    @MadaraUchiha Well, at +88/-247, it's shifted quite close to that arbitrary example since this answer was posted... – Izkata Aug 1 '19 at 15:13

Would you like to know when users are frustrated?

If so, you'll need to allow them to voice their frustration. And meta being the only place where they are currently allowed to do that, deleting frustration because it is "derailing" or "snarky" removes the site's only feedback loop.

Yes, it is messy and painful to learn that things are not as they should be. Negative feedback always is. But it is the price one pays for the opportunity to improve.

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    I agree with this, but there is a difference in receiving feedback, and allowing it to remain publicly visible. The first is almost always useful, the second can make you look bad, especially when the site is accused of "ignoring the input of the people that provide new content (answers) for free". As a user of course I like openness, but for a shareholder It could be reasonable to prefer some things to stay "under the rug". – user000001 Jul 31 '19 at 8:21
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    Only public feedback can be aggregated by the public, or publicly responded to. – meriton Jul 31 '19 at 8:38
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    I fear that they don't want to know when users are frustrated. Or at least, the longtime users that choose to participate in Meta. Seems like they're more interested in appeasing inexperienced users who might take to Twitter and criticize the site than actually hearing the frustration. I think they'd rather us just shut up and continue to work for free for them. Yes, the employees may deny it (and some of them may even genuinely want to hear our complaints) but it seems like those at the top don't want to hear us. – mason Aug 1 '19 at 0:03

This does the exact opposite of promoting civility and mutual understanding.

You're right that comments get used for extended discussion. That's a good thing. We need extended discussion because it's where ideas get challenged and defended and refined, and how we iteratively move towards each understanding each others' points of view. Having those back-and-forth debates visible in comments is valuable; I benefit, regularly, from reading two sides hashing out their differences in the comments.

Migrating to chat kills those conversations. It encourages them to be filled with frivolous... well... chat, with no quality control and attempt to keep the comments focused and useful, and kills the visibility and readability of the discussion.

The most damaging and unproductive conflicts we've been having have largely been characterised by a lack of back-and-forth discussion. The form looks like this: one side broadcasts it's anger at the other to the world, and the other has no idea where any of that anger is coming from. No discussion takes place; everyone walks away more frustrated and angry than they started, and nobody has been enlightened. (I count the current conflict among the instances of that model; I still don't know what sort of interactions Sara is trying to protect the staff from, how she thinks her current actions serve that goal, or what we've all done that she considers so immoral as to warrant the sort of language she's directed at us. I don't really foresee that changing, because virtually no dialogue has happened between the sides since Sara's post, and that's unlikely to change.)

Those kind of asymmetrical conflicts, where one side speaks its mind and the other is silent, are - to my mind - obviously a failure, and poison the relationship between the community and the staff. Having witnessed that pattern of failure, I'm against enacting policies that in practice I expect to simply ensure that every future conflict we have gets handled in this same destructive way.

Even if we want to placate Sara for the sake of trying to get HMQ back, and aren't just trying to build a healthy forum for discussion, it's not even obvious that any of this advances that goal. Sara's post never suggested that comments have anything to do with her opposition to Meta.


I suppose this is what's largely annoyed me about the issue with comments and the animosity towards Meta...a lot of commentators have taken the liberties given by Meta a bit too...broadly.

The policies of the site haven't changed and should be applied fairly and equally.

The issue now comes in the fact that we have what is a heavy hand coming back down to "fix" an issue which would require a gentler touch. All of a sudden, Meta is being labeled in ways I would rather not repeat since it's not constructive...and now it has to be Fixed™.

Okay, then. Let's just remember that we're on a Stack Exchange network site. Let's remember to be respectful and remember that we're all human. Attacks, hate and flaming have no real place here.

This applies to all of us.

Comments are fine since they're the tool we've been cursed blessed with, and until development time is actually expended to improve how these work, I'm more keen on seeing us actually adhere to the very well established policies around comments be enforced consistently and across the board rather than require yet another sweeping announcement about how this is Bad™ and needs to be Fixed™.

Just moderate the comments already.

EDIT: Just to make it clear...I'm not a fan of using Chat to supplant some of the larger conversation chains. I'd rather use one broken tool as a way to communicate rather than two broken tools in broken ways. When the dev team decides to fix this, we could revisit it.

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    I still think it should be a gentle touch, just with much more oversight. – Robert Harvey Jul 30 '19 at 20:18
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    I suppose I see a disconnect; I don't think the oversight is mandatory if the comments are simply cleaned up and people who decide to be jerks on Meta are given a time-out, as they should be. – Makoto Jul 30 '19 at 20:26
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    @RobertHarvey The thing is, mods deleting comments more zealously isn't really oversight, it's just more "operational engagement". Oversight would be seeing metrics on deleted comments somewhere, being able to see when our comments are deleted, maybe a reputation perk to view deleted comments, a required quarterly Meta post covering how many comments were deleted and on what posts, etc. – TylerH Jul 30 '19 at 21:16
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    @TylerH: By "oversight," I really mean "participation." As in "meta has been lacking in moderator participation." More moderation, using the same rules as before. – Robert Harvey Jul 30 '19 at 21:18
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    @RobertHarvey Ah, thanks for the clarification. In that case I agree that more moderator vindication of comment flags on Meta (and main) is needed, though with some actual oversight added in as a feature set to improve the experience, too. – TylerH Jul 30 '19 at 21:22
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    @Makoto The problem with "being a jerk" is that that is in the eye of the beholder. What is a constructive piece of criticism to one can be a nasty snark to another.. – Mr Lister Jul 31 '19 at 6:31
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    wonder if collapsing meta comments would qualify as gentler touch. Though, given that turning such a feature on and off doesn't seem to take any dev effort and is already well tested, it probably would be simpler to just run an experiment for a few weeks and find out in practice if it works or not – gnat Jul 31 '19 at 10:22

You know...if you (SO employees) actually used Meta for what Meta was for...maybe we'd be more jovial.

You know that whole thing where a dictator gets swarmed by the starving masses despite all the guns he surrounds himself with? Why is it called a revolution? It's because dictators don't listen to the people.

Meta is here to be a communication channel between the people and the functional dictatorship of Stack Overflow (the company).

But it isn't being used.

All the anger at the fact that our voice that is here to help guide what it is that we want for the site, to make it a better site, is because we aren't being heard. We're yelling and screaming louder and louder in larger and larger numbers to try and be heard.

It might not be working, but what other option do we have?

Enacting this proposal would only further stifle the outrage we have towards the changes being made to the site that are being implemented without our approval or input and the clamoring for the changes we want will simply move elsewhere, but be fragmented and harder to engage with, follow, or listen to.

You've literally boxed us in. Is it any surprise that we're banging on the walls?

We'd go somewhere else, but there is nowhere else to go.

And you're literally pouring sand in on our heads.

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    Er, Meta isn't really intended to be a communication channel between a community and the company. It's intended to be a place for the community to discuss meta topics relating to the community's main Q&A site. Company interaction is ancillary, not a primary function. – TylerH Jul 31 '19 at 3:34
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    Exactly there is nowhere else to go. We have lost our influence over the direction of the site. So it's more a matter of where do we go from here? We need to support each other through this, so we can work out what this means for us as a community – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 4:22
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    And for me a key point is that, though this sort of thing would be the company's undisputed prerogative if we were customers, we're not customers.. At the end of the day it's still their prerogative, but I don't think they understand why it rubs everybody so badly and the why is that we are the product, not customers. We're the ones creating the value. We're the ones generating the revenue (ultimately). For free! I worry that the company takes us for granted almost as much as the "help vampires" (sorry) do... perhaps more. – Lightness Races in Orbit Aug 1 '19 at 13:26
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    @TylerH If that were the case, tags like feature-request and status-completed wouldn't exist. – Izkata Aug 1 '19 at 15:17
  • @Izkata aside from the fact that such tags could well exist without any employee interaction ever, those were born here out of a lack of proper channel for technical issues, not included because they were part of a grand design. – TylerH Aug 1 '19 at 20:55
  • @TylerH The red tags can only be added by moderators, making them part of a design – Izkata Aug 1 '19 at 22:02
  • @Izkata being part of the current implementation is not at all the same thing as what I said. – TylerH Aug 2 '19 at 0:33

TLDR; This worries me

I want to start by saying I still trust the moderation team as a whole & am thankful that they at least posted something before enacting a new policy

I posted a question on a moderator's actions in regards to deleting comments and I am glad that an official post was made regarding this policy. However the tone of this post worries me so let me go into those reasons before even commenting on the proposal (from most worrisome to least):

I read this post as "we're doing this, there is no say"

Despite the title, despite the trust I've invested in the mod team here (including the OP whose posts I've enjoyed on Anime). This feels like one more heavy-handed attempt to stop a problem that I haven't even seen with no chance for discussion or for even having a voice once again.

Now, logically I don't think this is the case. I don't think its due to the wording of the post. It is due to the atmosphere of SE in general for the last year. That said I do not know how much good another "heavy-handed" approach will do or if it will be more harmful but the mod team has enough trust that it surprises & worries me that they would move to such an approach first.

And yes, for some reason I read this as - if you comment expect it to get insta-nuked cause we will be deleting any and all comments we can justify deleting.

Part of the reason I made the earlier question

I won't link to the questions where comments were deleted (they are already linked in my earlier post) but there was a clear question of the agenda of the moderator who removed the comments by several within later comments and in chat. I'm not saying there was an agenda by this mod but the fact that it was even a question (and still is from what I've seen in other comments and still in chat) is worrisome to me. I do not trust SE the company (I've had a few Meta.SE posts to this effect over the past year) but I always thought I could trust the moderators.

This change in policy moves very heavily towards censorship to me & makes me start questioning a group I thought was a representative of SO users. I never thought I would have to question this fact, but now I find myself wondering. Not whether they've turned their back on us or anything but "can they represent us with how much say has been taken". However, the fact that I'm wondering this at all....its not good.

I keep seeing comments asking questions of others or the poster being summarily deleted

In fact, I noticed that comments asking for clarification of some moderators & some SE employees were just gone without ever being answered (at one point, I was screen capturing each page to check with certain employees). Again, personally this was more with employees but this could start a perception of "if you question, criticism, or otherwise try to disagree with a mod's position - you should expect your comment will be deleted"1.

Due to what was happening over the last year (in regards to the above delete comments on SE employee's posts) - I know exactly how badly that soured my relationship & trust in various employees & SE as a whole. I do not want to see this happen with the mods (I would go as far as to suggest that if a mod deletes a comment which was critical of him/her - aside from clearly abusive ones - that this constitute a post automatically being made on Meta justifying it to ensure transparency and avoid the feelings I remember from being shutdown at every turn without even being acknowledged - lead to my 2nd vacation from SO).

Why I think comments are the best option (currently):

Now do I think comments are the best way to have a discussion? No.
Do I think they are the best option we have? Yes.

Why is it the best option:

  1. They are far more visible than a chat link
    • With rare exception, once comments are moved to chat - the discussion ends as nobody follows them to the chat room. So moving to chat (as it currently stands) is nearly the same as deletion.
  2. We cannot convert upvotes to stars or otherwise show the indicators on comment agreement/usefulness
    • You can argue about how representative these actually are but it is the only metric
  3. Once comments are moved it can be difficult to determine how the chat room is moderated
  4. I can see and read comment easily on mobile (chat on mobile is....an experience)

Basically if we had tooling which allowed mods to continually update a chatroom, move selected comments to chat, keep upvotes as stars, or any of the other options we've requested (making the "moved to chat" link more visible is one we will need to make if this policy goes through) then fine - moving to chat is great. However, due to what I outlined above - moving to chat kills the conversation and thereby removes a large part of the ability to discuss on Meta.

Or, maybe more clearly, when we get better tooling or a better option - by all means move to that better option. Comments are the best we've got for now so we shouldn't make it impossible to use the best feature we have for discussion.

If this policy does goes through

I'm not the most active on meta, esp after last year, so I know I don't have much say but I would just suggest that the "move to chat" feature was used liberally over deletion. Maybe we will get lucky and people will realized they can have a better conversation in chat and will use it more to keep the discussion going. Either way, it would avoid at least some of the situations I outlined in the first part by keeping the comments around (esp. in the beginning) even if it killed all discussion.

1: I do not think any mods have done this (certainly not in the recent week) but I have actually read that statement this week, at least twice, & had a developer friend express it to me as well in real-life so I know it has been expressed by at least a few.

  • I apologize, I realized that's how it reads only in hindsight when people pointed it out and have since edited. We (the mod team) genuinely thing that this should happen, and want to hear strong compelling arguments from the community (I feel that votes alone will not be a strong enough indicator, as any proposal to change of policy of any kind will assuredly be downvoted more than it is upvoted). We are strongly leaning towards implementing this, that is true. But we will absolutely take the feedback we see here into consideration, especially if a clear consensus is visible. – Madara's Ghost Jul 31 '19 at 7:33
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    @MadaraUchiha "I feel that votes alone will not be a strong enough indicator" - that is an extremely worrying statement to me. Votes are the best indicator we have around here! This feels like it's not too far away from the modus operandi taken up by SE nowadays - implement something, notify meta after the fact, apply some cosmetics in response to the outcry. I appreciate you're at least asking beforehand, but would have greatly preferred if you started with an open question such as "how do you want comments moderated" and then implemented an amalgamation of the most upvoted answers. – l4mpi Jul 31 '19 at 8:55
  • @MadaraUchiha 1st, I still like your posts in Anime and have never had a problem with your moderation efforts (before this) or distrust you personally but I did downvote because I disagree with enough of the proposal - not all, enough). 2nd, I posted this at the same time you made your change so the edit definitely helps (I'm leaving it in the answer though as the policy is still worrying me as it seems very heavy handed). 3rd, though I understand the lack of weight in downvotes & the need for feedback (and I do believe enough mods - including you - will listen) the +/- ratio is increasing – LinkBerest Aug 1 '19 at 2:10

There are several things to unpack in this quite elaborate question.


When upacking the core of the question, there might not be so much left of it...

Even though this is only remotely related to the comment moderation on meta itself, I'd like to add a short comment (sic) about your Intro:


It's not unusual that "bearers of bad news" have to handle the resulting frustration. There could be other ways to handle this. From the tip of my head:

  • Create a technical user - maybe simply called "Stack Exchange, Inc.". This user could be used for announcments or certain proposals, to soak up the reactions in a way that is not targeted at an individual (from some of the previous discussions it became clear that this is considered as a major issue).
  • This may sound cynical, but the whole thing actually is not about bad news, it's about bad decisions. Whoever makes these decisions has to take a step back and consider whether the decision is good or bad for the company or for the community or for the relationship between the two. It might be worth trying to not generate so many "bad news" for which you then have to send out a scapegoat to handle the backlash...

However, the other parts of the intro are much more focussed on what I consider to be the main source of the problem with "Comments on Meta" that you're probably trying to solve:


Stack Overflow is a Question and Answer site. Veterans are regularly correcting the newbies who refer to Stack Overflow as a "forum". It is not.

But from a bird's eye view, one issue is clear: Meta has been squeezed into the same structure. This may have its justifications, but these are probably purely technical: The same UI and tech stack could be used to handle the Q/A part and Meta. This works to some extent, e.g. using the voting mechanism for feature requests. But Meta is largely not about Questions and Answers, but about discussion. Some of the things that have been proposed in the answers here (e.g. "Chat-Threads" for derailing comment-threads), and even the mere fact that I'm currently quoting the parts of your question that my answers refer to shows that the Q/A structure is simply not suited for the kind of discussion that has to happen at some place.


A crucial question here is: What changed? Why did it work for 10 years, and why doesn't it work now? (You could try to respond to that... in the comments... because there is no other option...)

Slowly coming to the core of the question:

  • Off-topic comments are to be deleted. ...
  • Extended discussions are to be moved to chat. ...

To be honest, I don't see any relevant change here. All this already did happen, and you already mentioned that:


So most of the question was just about setting the stage for this - even though in the end, you didn't say clearly enough what this actually means in practice. Some questions have already been raised in other answers, and the cynical view here is that you've written this question as some sort of justification for a message that could be phrased more succinctly: "We're tired of the chit-chat, and will get rid of it as we like".

I wouldn't go so far to claim that the primary goal of this is to stall discussions or get rid of uncomfortable viewpoints that don't match some vague ideology policy goals of the site owners. But it certainly paves the road for this, considering the arbitrary nature of the decision about which comments are deleted and which comments are kept.

My conclusion is: There isn't really something "new" in this proposal. You're not saying much more than "we will be doing what we already did before, but a bit more of it, and maybe it's a bit more arbitrary". You could simply have done that, and I doubt that anyone would have noticed.

This will not solve the problems that there are decisions being made that come up as "bad news", that the community will be upset, that there is no proper place to adequately discuss these things, that community feedback is not taken into account, and all that ... but as far as I understood, this wasn't even the goal.


I've been lurking and watching this for a bit, and I feel it's time I throw my hat in this ring.

I have no idea on what to expect in terms of how my opinion will be taken, but here it is:

On Discussion and Meta

Meta in and of itself is about discussion. There are no two ways about it. We cannot have a site about bugs, feature requests, and support without having discussion. In fact, is one of our required tags for meta.

The idea of removing comments purely because they are a discussion about the post itself, or moving them to chat, feels incorrect to me because of this. I understand not wanting to clutter the page. However, this is a site about discussion. We require it.

Removing that discussion later because you feel it has now run its course and can be safely removed is also, I feel, not correct. That discussion, so long as it has been civil and constructive, is often part of our decision making process. Removing it removes the transparency of how Meta works. Some newer users already find it hard to navigate Meta, to the point that I felt it necessary to write a guide to proposing new feature requests. (Granted, some of the problems they have are on them, but I digress.)

On Chat and its Uses for Meta

Chat, while quite nice on its own, does not inherently solve the issue of discussions on Meta. For one thing, some companies, including mine off and on, block any "chat" site, Stack's included. This means that by straight moving the discussion to chat, a group of the contributors to the discussion can be cut out entirely, until such time as they can get to a location where they can access chat. By that time, the discussion may be over already, if it continued to begin with, and they will only be more frustrated and discouraged.

As to the discussion continuing to begin with, as others have noted, it doesn't always. It seems to me that a lot of people just don't bother to follow the link and continue the discussion in chat. When that happens, a potentially very useful and fruitful discussion dies early. How many ideas might be lost to this?

For the ideas that we don't lose, how will they get relayed back to the post? The discussions are an important part of Meta, as I stated before. Discussions are integral to how we do things. Chats, if I remember correctly, don't stay around forever if the rooms aren't being used. Not only that, but once the discussion has finished, you have to leave the question/answer just to see what happened with the discussion and what conclusions were drawn. For a site that insists our questioners must have all necessary resources in the post itself, it seems odd that we would send Meta goers off to another page, potentially multiple, to see all of the arguments made for or against specific proposals.

On Making New Questions and Answers

The viability of this option is just not always there. If a new question was posted every time someone had a slightly related comment that would be deemed off-topic to the question, but did not in any way answer the question, our duplicate numbers would skyrocket. The people posting those questions would be even more frustrated than they are just contemplating such ideas, as their attempt to discuss what they were attempting to with the idea will be shut down at every turn.

Likewise with answers, we will get a lot more answers. Questions will get filled with pages of answers, for fear that, should they be posted as comments, they will be deleted. People who commented before because they felt it wasn't really an answer and didn't want it deleted as "not an answer" will now swing the total opposite direction and post most less than borderline things as answers, for fear of their pertinent comment being deleted. Deciding whether your answer adds anything to a post will become more difficult as you wade through more answers, even for more trivial questions.

My Conclusions

In the long run, I feel that, with our current interface and setup, this will only make more work and hard feelings. There will be more duplicate question closures, more lost ideas, more frustration, and more "not an answer" flags for the mods.

This is, of course, just my prediction. I could, and hope to, be very wrong.

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    There's no intention of moving comments because they are about the post. The example I gave (a comment about another comment) refers to a comment that nitpicks on a particular thing that a comment said, in an attempt to create a conversation tangent, that's not actually related to the topic at hand. This proposal is not "let's move all meta discussion to chat", not even close. Comments are and will continue to being the main place for discussions on meta. Not every discussion should be moved. – Madara's Ghost Jul 31 '19 at 16:45
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    @MadaraUchiha The problem with that is where to draw the line. Because your example creates a problem of literally no discussion past comments on the post itself. It literally makes this comment here wrong. And that is my point. From this comment to anything replying to it, despite this comment being to clarify my point, would be a comment about another comment. It would, therefore, be moved or deleted, and the discussion is gone. Transparency is gone. Discussion is gone. – Kendra Jul 31 '19 at 16:48
  • Indeed, a separate question to discuss the exact details has been opened meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387905/…. We're still discussing this internally, but if you have a proposal for clearer guidelines, I'd love to hear it as an answer on that post :) – Madara's Ghost Jul 31 '19 at 16:52
  • I seem to have missed that question, my thanks. I'll work out my thoughts and write something up there for a proposal as well. – Kendra Jul 31 '19 at 16:53
  • @Kendra what I said here is relevant: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387883/… – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 17:09
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    @GeorgeStocker yet another perfect example why all of this is a bad idea: Your link now leads nowhere because the comment was either removed or moved to chat. And while you as a mod can theoretically edit that link later, normal users can't (at least not if 5 minutes have passed). So just to use your own logic right here, if what you said in that comment was truly relevant, it should have been posted as its own separate answer instead. As you apparently don't even follow this logic yourself, I don't see how you can justify forcing it on other people. – l4mpi Aug 1 '19 at 14:42
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    @GeorgeStocker Found it, that comment is now on the first page; you probably were seeing a cached second page: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387883/… – Izkata Aug 1 '19 at 15:32
  • @GeorgeStocker meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/388035 – Izkata Aug 1 '19 at 15:45
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    @GeorgeStocker apparently my comment asking why you did not choose to post the linked comment as an answer if it contained anything of value was removed. It was a genuine question very much related to the topic at hand and I'd still like to know your reasoning for it. Am I supposed to ask a separate question to get an answer for that or what way forward do you propose? – l4mpi Aug 2 '19 at 7:13

While this is taken a bit out of context (talking about answering in comments on main site), I think it is suitable here as well.

Deleting valuable contributions because you personally think that they should instead have been posted as an answer is not at all sensible. The job of a moderator is never to destroy value, at least not on Stack Exchange sites. That is thoroughly perverse. Other sites regularly delete comments that become a problem; that's also equally true on SO. – Cody Gray♦ Apr 25 at 7:27

Don't delete comments that are valuable to a discussion taking place.

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    Unfortunately, I think Cody Gray and I are in the minority on this. There are several SE sites that routinely delete comments posted as answers, and I am adamantly opposed to this practice. – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 16:49

Yes, but...

I think that this will accomplish the stated goals, and in fact it can do it without harming the discussion that meta is so good for. However, I'd like to ask that you make a separate post (or edit this one?) specifying in as much detail as possible what your new rules are. That'll help us know where we stand, and it'll help us know that it's being done fairly, to everyone. It'll also provide a reference point to moderators, so that you can provide a very unified front, which is something that we need now.

Obviously, you'll not be forcing every comment into a chat room; only the chains that are beginning to get long. The fact that they're getting long means that it's a somewhat complicated issue, or at least not clear to everyone. In that case, a chatroom is the perfect place to get it figured out.

That said, I also have a suggestion. Every or almost every discussion that needs cleaning up will have a focus. There will be n <= 4 points of contention, where one group thinks one thing, and another thinks the other. Instead of saying the comments were moved to chat, say users are discussing whether <topic> is xxx. Then, when the discussion has reached a conclusion, they could optionally post a second comment noting the conclusion. This will help some users' concerns about visibility, but make the focus still be on the post, not the comments. I know it might take a tad of extra work, but you're already reading quickly through the chain to make sure it's not 15 separate clarifications, and is instead a discussion.

As usual, when a consensus is reached, the OP can also edit their post to incorporate changes.

Good examples

The discussion on the exact meaning of "beginning to get long" has been moved to chat and is being discussed.


Some users are conflicted on whether these comments will help visibility. The discussion has been moved to chat.

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    Excellent post. Can I recommend that you post this as a new question. We can take the feedback from this post and write a canonical answer. This will ultimately need to be in the faq – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 4:30
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    You could leave this here and link to this question and answer and put it out there asking for official clarification. I'd support that. One in many hundreds :) – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 4:38
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    Yes, I wanted to write something like this after reading through the entire "discussion". – Cindy Meister Jul 31 '19 at 5:02
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    @Yvette done! I've left the suggestion (the second half of this) out of that post. You guys could address that in an answer to that post, or I could post another question, or I'll probably just leave it here for now. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 5:13
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    None of these comments are requests for clarification. – user4639281 Jul 31 '19 at 14:45
  • @Tiny I edited my other post, but tl;dr is that short points are ok; the problem is with extended discussions. Kinda like it's always been, but more strictly enforced. As I see it. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 14:50
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    No, I meant none of the comments under this answer are requests for clarification and under the new rules they should all be posted as new meta questions. The moderators aren't even following their own rules. – user4639281 Jul 31 '19 at 14:52
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    The rules will not change at all. Our oversight will. It will go from "we don't look at meta at all" to "Meta is subject to moderation, just like the main site is." There have always been constraints on meta, we just haven't adequately enforced them. – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 14:53
  • Robert, you could maybe clarify that in the main post. I get the impression that many people see this as a change in rules, not a change in moderation. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 14:55
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    There's been a lot of hand-wringing here over the treatment of comments, but comments have always been subject to these actions. – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 14:56

I think an important part of cleaning up comments is to emphasize that substantial comments should be made into posts. Otherwise I imagine the moderators will be spending a lot of time trying to figure out if a comment is relevant or not.

On other Stack Exchange sites (like RPG), I've seen the following strategy work. Any comment that smells vaguely like an answer gets a ping from a moderator reminding the commenter to avoid answering in comments and to make posts instead because comment voting is misleading. At some point, that comment gets deleted. I think this strategy could work for MSO moving forward since it probably gets about the same amount of traffic as some of the other full Stack Exchange sites.

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    To be super-clear: on RPG (for example) you've seen that strategy employed; God only knows if it works (for whatever your value of "work" is). I know in my years I've not gotten any more useful feedback on the strategy than (~2%) "you-all are comment-Nazis destroying what should be a good resource for fun, fachrissakes!" (~2%) "this is part of what makes RPGSE the only sane place to actually engage in RPGs on the net" (98%) <radio silence>. – nitsua60 Jul 30 '19 at 22:53
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    (Also, I apparently can't add up to 100. Sorry.) – nitsua60 Jul 31 '19 at 2:17
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    @nitsua60 I'd definitely encourage asking Shog or another CM for some numbers on that. It's probably something that's easily query-able for them. – TylerH Jul 31 '19 at 3:31
  • Do those sites like RPG also apply that strategy to their meta sites? The needs for meta discussions are different than the plain Q&A of the main sites, so what works for one might not work so well for the other. – sth Aug 2 '19 at 11:19
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    @sth I'll reply for RPG; no idea on other sites. On meta we do little comment-moderation. Top occasion being that a discussion brewing in comments seems substantial enough (and distinct enough from the OP) that we encourage its spawning of another meta and firmly request that discussion of it in its current location stop. Second occasion being personal/personality-driven attacks/rudeness. That said, in my years participating in RPG I've not seen 1/10th the heated argument that the last two weeks here have produced--I'm not sure how useful the comparison is. However, if you'll allow me to [1/2] – nitsua60 Aug 5 '19 at 3:53
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    [2/2] opine, I'd say that it's not clear to me how well the needs of meta discussion were being met here. The staff have said that they don't like how it goes. (How that doesn't get everybody to hit the brakes and say "whoa, we gotta rethink this" befuddles me.) There's a lot of piling-on and repetition: symptoms (IMO) of people not feeling heard or like there are effective ways to communicate. And some pretty strong personalities not shy about levying personal attacks--that does a lot (IME) to push away the 90% (SWAG, there) of meta readers who don't actively participate. – nitsua60 Aug 5 '19 at 3:56

My gut feeling says that if the proposed future comment moderation will end up like the rules enacted by Martijn and George (and potentially others, they're the most visible) in this thread, I think it might lead to more drama than just leaving comments alone. But, this is only a gut feeling, so in order to get some hard data I would like the mods to provide some stats. I don't know if all of these metrics are possible to find with the current tooling, but ideally I would like to know the following for starters:

  • How many comments have been deleted under this question and its answers?
  • How many comments have been moved to chat?
  • How many comments were deleted in response to flags (separate counts for each flag type if possible), and how many on the discretion of a mod without being flagged?
  • How many of the deleted comments are things that could have been deleted without the need to look at any context (e.g. abuse, spam, totally off-topic stuff)?

Where you would put this, I don't know - maybe in a comment, maybe in a separate answer to this question? But as this is IMO highly relevant to this exact debate, I do not think it would be in the interest of discussion to open a separate question for this.

To elaborate on my motivation a bit: First, I would like some raw numbers to get a feel for the size of the problem - are "grey area" comments deleted in droves or is that a wrong impression caused by exaggerated outcry? How many abusive comments have been deleted where everybody can agree it's a good thing? Etc.
Second, as can be seen under multiple answers to this very question, mods deleting comments will cause friction. To resolve these and future cases without drama, I believe it will required for the mods to provide at least basic transparency and accountability. So if that's not possible for any reason, IMO this proposal has the potential to cause excessive drama and thus do more harm than good.

At the end of the day, as far as I can tell this proposal is intended to resolve some of the drama between SE and meta folks by reducing snark, pile-on comments etc. But if implementing this causes drama between meta folks and mods instead, it will not resolve anything.

  • You want... Statistics? – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 15:09
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    @RobertHarvey I'm assuming this isn't intentional, but this comment seems very "snarky" to me. ("an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm"). I believe this about multiple of the comments I've seen from you on this topic, such as "You first" when asked for specifics about why chat is preferable. – GrumpyCrouton Jul 31 '19 at 15:59
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    Your asking for a technological solution to a people problem. – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 16:02
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    @RobertHarvey Asking for/studying statistics is not a "solution" to a problem, but a means to get to a solution. – GrumpyCrouton Jul 31 '19 at 16:04
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    @RobertHarvey see my edits. TL;DR, I'd like to see some numbers to more accurately gauge the impact of the policy, and I think some sort of transparency will be required if this were to be implemented because otherwise it will only lead to more drama. – l4mpi Aug 1 '19 at 7:24

There are a few practical issues with this proposal. (Not in any particular order.)

  1. Moving to chat removes upvotes. (Mentioned here)

  2. Chats are auto-deleted.

  3. We cannot tell when a comment has been deleted. (Mentioned here)

  4. It is unlikely that people will read the chats. (Mentioned here)

(1) Removing upvotes is an issue because the voting system makes it very easy to tell which comments resonate with people. Stars may be used as a substitute (mentioned here), but I'm still worried about readability. (I've personally found comments and upvotes much easier to read and scroll through than chat and stars. User feedback (read: data) may be helpful in determining if my experience is similar to other users'.)

(2) Chats auto-deleting is a problem because often times people will later on want to understand the conversation that took place. I also believe it may feel invalidating to say something in chat, knowing that it will be deleted in the future, which may hinder discussion.

(3) Not being able to determine when a comment has been deleted is difficult because sometimes really useful comments will reference previously deleted comments. This can cause readers to not only be confused about what is being talked about, but also to misinterpret a writer's emotions, which can be critical in understanding the writer's message and how to respond. (Small example from this page.) Moving to a Reddit-like solution where there is a message saying that someone's comment was deleted could be useful for remedying these problems.

(4) It would be nice to have some facts (read: data) regarding whether or not chats are read as frequently as comments, as I am not sure it is true. However, given my experience, it seems likely that it is true. That said, this is a problem because long discussions with valuable material may not be seen by many users if they are moved to chat. This can cause repetition of arguments and a lack of understanding of past discussion in future comments and answers on a meta post.

Meta seems to serve two purposes -

  1. To get constructive feedback about the site (whether this be questions about the site itself, or proposals of site changes).

  2. To determine people's feelings regarding certain proposals.

Please note that upvotes and downvotes are not constructive feedback. They are a method of determining people's feelings (purpose #2). Yet, upvotes and downvotes seem to be a critical aspect of meta, which is one of the main reasons I included purpose #2.

This proposal seems to be focused towards purpose #1. The goal seems to be removing more emotional conversation about a particular topic and instead sticking to constructive feedback.

I personally agree with this move. I think that having less emotional responses in meta will help with some of the issues that this site is and has been experiencing.

However, I do think we will need to find a better place for accomplishing purpose #2. (Assuming that this proposal is implemented.)

I don't have any good sociology papers to link to about this, but it seems fairly obvious to me that in communities, being able to judge the emotions of others in the community is extremely important. It's also important to know which members within the community feel a particular way. Is it long-time respected members of the community? Authorities? Newcomers? People who have a history of certain behaviors? Who it is that is feeling a particular way matters a lot in communities. (This comment and answer from this page helps also provides some tangental reasoning as to why purpose #2 is important.)

I don't think that upvotes and downvotes signal enough emotion behind how people are feeling to particular proposals, or who is feeling what way. There is no difference between a vote of mere disagreement, and a vote of anger. And no one without moderator superpowers can see who has voted in a particular way.

Chats may be able to do this, but issues (2) and (4) are particularly worrying. If future generations don't know the previous discussions and arguments, how many discussions and emotions will have to be repeated? (This would be particularly ironic on a site with a main goal of sharing information so that it doesn't need to be repeated.)

In short, I think that the main idea behind this proposal is a good one, but that there are some issues that need to be solved, and some needs that should be addressed before enacting this proposal.


I broadly agree with the thrust of this proposal. Meta can benefit from tighter comment moderation, as comment threads here all too often blow up and become unproductive, or actively harmful, wasting a fair bit of energy and goodwill from all involved parties. For my own part, as a regular user, I have been slowly learning not to engage in pointless arguments; also, as of late I have been using comment flags more liberally in Meta, in the spirit of what you suggest.

The main pitfall I believe the mods should be wary of is over-correction. The way I see it play out in SO and MSO, the guidelines about comments enable moderators to remove comments with minimal fuss if they become a problem. That can work well, as long as there is sufficient clarity about what it means for comments to become a problem. For instance, if moderator intervention can stop a pile-on, or quell an extended unproductive argument that drowns everyone else's input, or make a very high volume discussion somewhat more manageable by moving it to chat, by all means that should be done. However, if a dozen comments under a Meta post happen to be a constructive discussion by a handful of users trying to hash out the finer points of a suggestion, there is no reason to delete the comments, or to move them to chat.

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    Voted up; I agree. I’ll also add that two users having an isolated debate is different than actual genuine clarifications that benefit all, and is weighed differently. – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 1:19

I think one mistake in this question is that you have tried to bundle several reasons for deleting comments in one question. Anybody who disagrees with any of them will downvote the question, even if they could have agreed with some of them.

The main problem is:


This is the problem that we want to fix.

There are also these other problems:



These are much less important problems. We should not try to discuss them all in a single topic. So my proposal: lets just discuss the main problem for now. If we can fix the main problem, we can try the other ones in the future. Really: just create a new question talking about the main problem. Let the other problems aside for now, they are not urgent at all.

  • I feel like joining these things in the same proposal is causing people to talk passed one another; take for example the comments below Lundin's answer. Some users were talking about comments getting deleted for being attacks or snipes at a user, others responding they were deleted because they weren't constructive, and then there were responses asking how the comments were ad hominem, and free speech things... Conflating the negativity with the hostility with simply the extended discussion is really hindering the discourse. I definitely support your proposal. – Davy M Aug 2 '19 at 3:22

I'm undecided whether to up- or down-vote the proposal. I agree with both sides of the yes/no arguments. As noted elsewhere, the site tooling is something of an obstacle. But if Cullub's proposal could be implemented and used more than actual deletion then I could stand behind this.

One problem is when interaction takes place during someone's down-time. Those following in real-time 1. Have the opportunity to see "everything" and 2. Know what's been lost/moved.

The over-all "feel" becomes disjointed, making the experience rather frustrating for those of us "late to the party". Coming to something like this six, eight or more hours after it has started is a challenge:

  • When the discussion chains in comments are long and convoluted, it's difficult to sort out and follow the individual "threads". Especially when (and for some reason especially today) people seem to have forgotten to "ping" to whom they're responding (spending too much time in chat, recently, perhaps?). When individual comments have been deleted (as today), it becomes even more difficult.

  • If comments that are actually discussions (as opposed to "snarky" observations that contribute nothing) are deleted as repetitive or off-topic, rather than moved to chat, we have had no chance to keep up. Often, people reference these things at a later point and those of us in a different time zone have no chance of staying in the loop.

OTOH (coming back to Cullub's proposal) if comments are moved per topic, rather than in huge blocks, it would actually make our life easier.

Another aspect of "move rather than delete" is that mods are not putting a "value" on the comment contribution. What some may find off-topic, others might consider relevant. In the heat of the moment, the comment OP probably does consider the opinion relevant. Deleting things out-of-hand is somewhat insulting, especially when emotions are running high.

Moving to chat gives the OP an opportunity to get a response and let off steam. If others aren't interested, there's no discussion, which is a vote in and of itself. If the community does find the point useful, the discussion in chat can come back as a Q or A on Meta. But simply deleting does not allow the opportunity.

Not sure it's possible, but it would be useful if later comments could be moved to the same chat room as earlier ones if they are the same topic, to keep discussion "threads" coherent.

Being able to downvote comments (disagree) would be useful, as well. (On Main SO, too...)

  • I agree with this. We need some clarity. Currently we're a bit all over the shop. Consistency is important. – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 5:18

I'm going to pretend that this Meta question was actually posted in a "here is the problem, how do we fix it?" instead of "we see this problem and we're going to fix it this way unless you say really strongly say no" format.

As suggested by Andrew Morton (mods, please don't delete his comment, no matter how ephemeral you seem to think comments are), comments should be threaded, like on Reddit or other highly successful asynchronous discussion forums. Q/A works great for compiling an encyclopedia of useful content, and chat works well for rapid fire discussion between a small number of people. But forum/threaded comment style is effective for having multiple discussions on complex issues.

Voting works well, it helps to encourage useful points to be seen by others. I'd also like to see the character limit lifted. Too often we have to post multiple comments in a row to get our ideas across.

  • I use a tampermonkey script which forces threaded-comments everywhere. Comments are extremely easy to read through with this bitbucket.org/balpha/user-scripts/raw/tip/threading-comments/… – GrumpyCrouton Jul 31 '19 at 16:13
  • @GrumpyCrouton While I appreciate the link, the solution for this really needs to come from within the company. – mason Jul 31 '19 at 17:16
  • Oh yes, I totally 100% agree with that. We shouldn't have to rely on outside tools/scripts to do things the site can easily do natively, however, we still have to. – GrumpyCrouton Jul 31 '19 at 17:18
  • @GrumpyCrouton Is the script from balpha, a former SO employee? At least someone in the company realized that comments can be improved. – Trilarion Jul 31 '19 at 21:57
  • @Trilarion It says the author is "Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe", not sure if that answers your question or not. The link does contain "balpha", but I don't know specifics. I don't remember where I found the script – GrumpyCrouton Jul 31 '19 at 23:43

I agree with flagging more stuff. Rude or condescending comments should not be permitted on Meta any more than they should be permitted on the main site.

One problem I see here, though: culturally, it's generally regarded as more acceptable to be very blunt in comments in Meta (probably even more so than on the main site). I've admittedly been guilty of that on a fair number of occasions myself. We need to make a decision about when something crosses the line from being very blunt to being condescending or rude. That line can be remarkably hard to draw.

On the one hand, I can definitely see how this bluntness could be mistaken for rudeness for people who are unfamiliar with Meta. I can also see how this would be poor optics (whether the bluntness is intended to be rude or not).

On the other hand, I'd hate to lose the ability to give and receive honest feedback - after all, isn't that part of the point of Meta in the first place? I've certainly gotten plenty of very direct feedback here myself; yes, it can sting a little bit sometimes, but I've certainly never had panic attacks or nightmares over it. It's important that people who read and participate in Meta understand not to take stuff too personally.

On a somewhat different topic: if Meta is really as unrepresentative, shouldn't we focus on having more people participate in Meta to get a more balanced perspective? Can there be research done on why people don't participate in Meta?

Also, I assume that most people who are active on Meta are also quite active on the main site in some capacity. On the other hand, from what I've read, the majority of people who post on the main site only post one or two things. I almost hate to say this, but from my perspective this almost seems like a case of "all customers are created equal, but some are more equal than others." Sure, some of them can be converted to frequent contributors (it was months between my first and second post), but the fact remains that the vast majority of this group will never be frequent contributors. Quite simply, people who rarely visit the site and generate little content are far less important than frequent visitors and contributors because they don't contribute much to the site or to revenue.

More than likely, we'll never be able to get a good representation for infrequent visitors and contributors, and I'm not sure whether we should even care. (Yes, the irony of making such a blunt statement is not lost on me in light of my first couple of paragraphs, but I think that it's important to debate this statement openly and clearly). The opinions of people who already are - or are likely to become - frequent visitors and contributors are far more important than people who post once and visit once or twice a year.

By analogy, in many western countries, the majority of people who are eligible to vote don't do so. No one is suggesting that we should therefore abandon holding elections, or that election results shouldn't be binding because they're "not representative." The people who don't vote are perfectly free to do so, so if they're dissatisfied with the decisions that are being made it's kind of on them to participate.

That's my perspective, at least. I don't know if it's Stack Exchange's perspective. I kind of doubt that they'll do this, but Stack Exchange should clarify who they think that the customer is, and which customers are more equal than others. Honestly, if SE does not see me as one of the more equal customers, I'd prefer to know that.

Just to address one final point brought up in the original post: I really don't like the idea of moving comments to chat. I can't even use chat behind my corporate firewall, so if I'm reading a Meta post while I'm at work I can't see (or participate in) that aspect of the discussion.

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    On the subject of participation in meta, the figure of 0.015 percent that corporate quotes is almost certainly understated. That calculation includes everyone that has ever created an account, and fully 75 percent of those people are what I consider non-participants (i.e. 11 rep or less). The true figure is probably closer to 1 or 2 percent, but even that number shouldn't necessarily give people pause; even our own democratic governments are merely representative ones. – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 17:06
  • @RobertHarvey Yes, that's one of the things I was thinking of. The vast majority of people who have 11 rep or less will never be significant contributors to the site, so it's questionable how much of a say they should have in how the site is run. – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Jul 31 '19 at 17:08
  • @EJoshuaS I can't use chat at the client site right now either; I'm having the sub-optimal experience of using my phone to respond to chat pings. – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 17:57
  • I hear what you're saying. I just want to say... it is not impossible to give feedback with a fake smile and still make it hit home; bluntness/directness is but one way to communicate feedback. It takes a few more words sure and it may need to be done under the pleasure of a nice hot cup of tea and some wringing of the hands in an evil scientist sort of way, but honest feedback can definitely be packaged in pretty words. Whether you want to communicate feedback in that way... well... that's personal. I'm just saying a policy change regarding this is not the end of the world. It merely sucks. – Gimby Aug 2 '19 at 13:41

I'm in favor of this, but

We need some more transparency on what gets deleted and when. On Interpersonal Stack Exchange, we used to have the comment bot. It recorded all comments in a chat room for posterity. I think we could use something like this here so that users can challenge deletion of comments or at the very least get an overview of which comments have been deleted.

This is not to say that I expect any of you to delete comments for ideological reasons or to suppress disagreement, but it seems to be a concern that several people have that blocks them from supporting this proposal. Additionally, increased transparency has other benefits.

With that transparency concern out of the way, there should be nothing stopping this going forward, especially since the userbase will have the informed opportunity to call for course correction if anyone ever gets too zealous in their deleting.

Additionally, this would have the benefit of not requiring implementation work from Stack Exchange, which we all know is unlikely to happen to support us in this.


Since my proposed step towards archiving comments does not take any dev time, I've asked and recieved tentative permission to do this anyways from the mod team, and the SOBotics Team graciously allowed us to use their generic all purpose Tracker-Chatbot Boson for this purpose.

As a result, all comments on meta (deleted or not) are now archived in the Meta Stack Overflow Comment Archive.

  • In the meanwhile, you can always call out moderators on comments that were deleted, either with flags or with meta posts. I agree that increased transparency and accountability is good. However, I'm not sure a chat bot is the right tool for the job here. My intuition tells me that the volume and rate of comments on meta is too great for a chatbot in a single room. I like the direction though. I'll also admit to not having concrete numbers on the volume and rate of comments on meta. Might still be worth considering. – Madara's Ghost Jul 31 '19 at 7:19
  • @MadaraUchiha can you see how many comments were deleted on meta percentage wise or in absolute numbers in a certain time? If so I can employ SEDE to make a pretty accurate representation of how many comments come in on meta during various timeslots. – magisch Jul 31 '19 at 7:25
  • @MadaraUchiha I just had to look up a moderators deletion history (of only a day) which included one of my own comments (at least - not sure beyond that) and it was not an easy task and I'm still not sure what I found - I left it out of my original post because I thought the other part was more pertinent and was a bit sick of the drama (so let the patterns I did see slide) – LinkBerest Jul 31 '19 at 7:26
  • @Magisch 1445 comments were deleted by moderators in the past 30 days. There may be more (as comments with certain words in them get instanuked when flagged by anyone), but it should be very close. – Madara's Ghost Jul 31 '19 at 7:28
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    @MadaraUchiha cursory uncorrected querying reveals we get between 90 to 500 undeleted comments on meta per day. (source) – magisch Jul 31 '19 at 7:33
  • Additionally, I've pulled average comment counts for each day of the week across the last 1800 days here. It seems to hover around 240-280 comments per day with less on the weekends. – magisch Jul 31 '19 at 7:40
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    If we assume for the purposes of determining feasibility that 3000 comments per month get deleted (deliberately highballing here to determine feasibility), we're looking at 380-400 comments per day on peak days with 100 or so comments per day on down days. That certainly seems doable to feed to a chat room, and users that were interested in auditing their own deleted comments would have no issue searching for their own username in desired timeframes in chat. – magisch Jul 31 '19 at 7:44
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    For further clarity, I made a listing of which timeframes get the most comments in any given week here – magisch Jul 31 '19 at 8:05
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    @Magisch: I think your query doesn't match the one of Madana, because many comments are deleted with their question. Some older stats may be found here though: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/368782/4548692 – user000001 Jul 31 '19 at 15:53
  • Mods can already see deleted comments, 10k users can see deleted question, new privilege (at 15 or 20k) to be able to see deleted comments ? – Tensibai Aug 1 '19 at 9:15
  • @Tensibai Seems like a good idea. But for now i've just made an archive room, so technically everyone can see all comments now. – magisch Aug 1 '19 at 9:18
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    This would have the advantage of being still attached to the original post. – Tensibai Aug 1 '19 at 9:28
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    @Tensibai fair point, but I think we both know getting dev time for that is unlikely rn. – magisch Aug 1 '19 at 9:29

Fact Statements

The statements I am making about our lack of control as a community in terms of driving decisions are not a matter of opinion, it's been made clear to me by the community team, that things have changed and are changing. They've made it clear there's no amount of meta lobbying that will change their stance on this. That is why I'm advocating we put our energies into things we can influence. I am not sure how to go about that yet, hence the vagueness of my posts, I'm think the community needs to know where they stand. It's important. We have felt disenfranchised and ignored for some time. It's good to know exactly where we stand.

  1. The community team observes our feedback and takes it into account.
  2. But we are only considered as a minority in what sources of feedback they are collating
  3. The community team has made it clear the decision making rests with the business Stack Overflow, not the meta community.

For instance, the moderators are unable to sway the community team to reinstate the hot meta posts.

My Ramblings

I'm concerned. Concerned about the changes in this site and what's ahead.

It's been made clear that the active meta community is considered insignificant. The Stack Overflow employees have drawn a line in the sand.

Currently they find our community input helpful in parts. My concern is we will lose meta altogether. I have no information about this in any way; it's an unknown.

We need to pull ourselves together as a community. It's too late to run recriminations. We've spent the last 15 months doing that (since he welcoming blog post). We now need to stand and say, how can we work within these new parameters.

It's clear the employees are tasking moderators with more power and autonomy, and they want us to be inline with the policies of the site. This is something that has been dropped in our laps. I, for one, didn't know about the Hot Meta Posts being removed until I saw it on meta.

Currently our team is chatting constantly, trying to find compromises and solutions to a complex and difficult change to the site and what is expected of us.

There are a lot of moderators and all this tension has finally culminated in several moderators coming out of the woodwork and rigorously moderating meta. Up until this point you had Cody and I handling most of the meta flags and we were liberal on allowing comments to stay, as that has been the done thing and the backlash on deleting comments was overwhelming on here.

I can assure you, the only thing the moderators are trying to achieve is a way to improve the site. It's not about taking people's voices. To be fair, people have made their opinions known and very loudly and you know what? It's time for a change people. If our complaints are not actually going to change anything, then we need to stop. It's just exhausting and repetitious.

People are tired. Stop banging the proverbial head against the proverbial wall. We need to work within the new paradigms of the changing site. We don't want to give the Stack Overflow Company a reason to close down meta, that will irrevocably change the site.

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    "If our complaints are not actually going to change anything, then we need to stop." Just because you've completely given up on anything improving, or the idea that anything any of us do here has a chance of being helpful doesn't mean everyone else is forced to do the same. If you don't think it's useful for you to express your views, by all means, don't. But saying no one else is allowed to express their opinions because you don't think SO will ever do anything isn't the solution. And there's the fact that there aren't a whole lot of other choices people have besides speaking their mind. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 2:53
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    I'm not sure whether to vote this up or vote it down (I can't tell where you stand on the proposal!). – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 31 '19 at 2:59
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    @Servy I'm passing the message on. I'm telling you the employees are not taking notice of many of the meta users. They have told us this. I cannot be clearer. It's not about giving up, it's about being told by a business, hey this is our business, we control it and this is what we are not willing to give. I cannot be clearer. I've been an active lobbier for this site publicly and behind closed doors. I'm stressed about it too. – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 2:59
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    @Draco18s I don't know! I'm expressing my shock and fatigue and also how it's really changed and I don't know where we're heading. It was more a case of stating facts to try and give people a glimpse of what is going on behind closed doors. – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 3:00
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    @Servy I'll do you a deal. I'll ask people not to delete any comments under this post. – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 3:01
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    Yvette, when you were up for election as a moderator I didn't vote for you for a very specific reason; I thought that you put yourself out there too much. The way moderation was in my eyes a couple of years ago, I thought that moderators should be more subdued, constant and in line with the existing policy, and some other boring things in my head. I couldn't have been more wrong, and I am so glad that enough users did choose you, because someone who sticks their neck out and risks unfavorable opinions to do what she thinks is right is exactly what we've needed. – Davy M Jul 31 '19 at 3:37
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    I may not always agree with your decisions, and you've dealt with all kinds of feedback because of your strong opinions. I know it's exhausting, as you got your moderation sea-legs on a really rough patch, but I appreciate all the effort you've put into taking care of the site. Please don't give up. (Not that you're saying anything about giving up, you're not, but the fatigue is real, and I want you to know it's not in vain.) – Davy M Jul 31 '19 at 3:37
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    @DavyM that is so sweet. Don't make me tear up now. It's been a tough ride and my own mental health hasn't helped at times, but I do love our site. Funnily I actually love our meta community, even the people I butt heads with - they probably don't realise, I do care about them, even though we annoy the you know what out of each other at times. It's like a huge family and I don't want to lose our community. That's the God's honest truth, so I'm really trying hard just to guide people into accepting the changes we have no control over. I'm not leaving, I'm hopeful there will be good changes. – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 3:43
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    "We need to work within the new paradigms of the changing site." - Is this a conclusion that you've reached by yourself? Or were you explicitly told this from inside? Btw I also don't always agree with your posts, but I do admire your openness in them. Please keep it up! – Mysticial Jul 31 '19 at 3:58
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    @Mysticial yep, it's what I've been directed by the employees, hence I keep harping on about it. It's not a matter of opinion. It was the point of this post meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387651/…. Really to let people know where we stand and what we can do and what is now pointless. Does that help? And thanks, yep we cannot all agree, but I've worked hard to get to know our community and how to communicate constructively. I honestly hope to nurture us through this, so we can still exist t – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 4:02
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    @YvetteColomb Yes it does answer my question. Thank you. There's a very specific reason why I asked. But given the current circumstances, I'm no longer willing to talk about it on the SE network. – Mysticial Jul 31 '19 at 4:10
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    @Mysticial fwiw I'm striving to keep the lines of communication open as as current as possible. It's a little tricky, as it's all new and the mod team is finding its legs. It's a departure from the way the site used to run. It's a wait and see if we like what they do with the site. :/ It is a loss and a grief for people. – user3956566 Jul 31 '19 at 4:14
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    @Yvette Thank you thank you thank you for your work with communication. I'm not the most active Meta user, but I care about the site, and your work has enabled me, and I'm sure many others to see where we are, and therefore where we need to go. You're doing something incredibly important, and keeping very level headed about it, so my heartfelt thanks. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 4:28
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    @GeorgeStocker so basically if Meta stays Meta its gone. If we change it into not Meta it will still be gone because its not Meta (its not what the community has built) - so lose, lose. And people wonder why we are giving up – LinkBerest Jul 31 '19 at 7:09
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    @YvetteColomb Telling the community that you've discussed these sentiments with the company and they've told you they aren't willing to give is great. By all means, pass on whatever information they give to you that they aren't willing to post here themselves. What I have a problem with is you saying that people here can't express their views, and that you will use your moderator privilege to stop them, just because you've given up. If people are wasting their time talking to a void, let them talk into a void. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 13:24

OK, so I feel like there needs to be some clarity injected into this discussion.

First of all, nobody wants to be the arbiter of content here. None of the moderators have any interest in suppressing anyone's opinions. What they do have an interest in is that you use meta in productive ways. That doesn't mean we suppress people's opinions, it means that we don't allow meta to descend into a mosh pit.

What do I mean by "productive?" Here is an illustration:


Comment from Servy to Robert Harvey listing four reasons they prefer comments to chat.

Not Productive:

Two deleted comments from Servy to Robert Harvey. The first accuses Robert of double standards. The second complains that Robert has not responded yet. The time stamp indicates that it was left an hour after the first comment.

This shouldn't be controversial. The first comment example advances the discourse, the second does not. This, in a nutshell, is what needs to happen at meta.

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    None of the moderators have any interest in suppressing anyone's opinions. Exactly. We want people to put their civil discourse and viewpoints into places where it can be best seen, found, voted on, and clarified. Comments aren't it. Posts are. Even with that said, as long as your comment is constructive, on topic, not an extended discussion, and civil, it's going to stay around (with very few exceptions). – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 16:18
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    Moderator Note: As the reason to purge all comments says, "Comments should be purged when they have degraded into pointless bickering and / or noise, and the entire set is unsalvageable." If you post another comment here promoting the same, you can expect it to be deleted. – George Stocker Jul 31 '19 at 19:36
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    @GeorgeStocker "not an extended discussion" so you'll allow some comments, but if too many people start caring enough to comment, you'll delete them? I'm really not being facetious: that appears to be exactly what happens. – mason Jul 31 '19 at 19:58
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    @mason: I chose the two comment examples I did for this post, because I consider them highly illustrative of the problem with meta in general, which is how to encourage people to stay focused on the problem and not get mired in tangentials. – Robert Harvey Jul 31 '19 at 20:20
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    @GeorgeStocker Sure, but there's a lot of wiggle room in "doesn't really add anything substantial or relevant to the topic of the post". And judging by the way you gentleman have been deleting comments that I feel are substantial and relevant, I don't trust your judgement anymore. And the lack of oversight capabilities has me doubly worried. – mason Jul 31 '19 at 20:34
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    The oversight is as follows, @mason: ALL moderators on Stack Overflow can see ALL deleted comments (on SO or MSO). ALL moderators on Stack Overflow can, if need-be, restore comments deleted by a different moderator on SO or MSO. This should be sufficient to resolve any overreach - but if you're concerned that it is not, post an answer: deleted answers are visible to both moderators and any user with >= 10K reputation, thus greatly increasing the amount of potential oversight. – Shog9 Jul 31 '19 at 22:03
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    @GeorgeStocker You can't say, "None of the moderators have any interest in suppressing anyone's opinions." And then explain why it's okay that moderators are suppressing people's opinions just because they're comments and not answers. What you're actually saying is, "moderators will suppress people's opinions in comments, but not if they post an answer", which is absurd, because not all information belongs in an answer on meta. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 22:46
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    @GeorgeStocker Just because you think that answers are more visible than comments doesn't justify mods deleting useful and constructive comments that express opinions they don't like. Deleting them doesn't make those comments more visible. It's just abusing your position. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 22:47
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    @RobertHarvey "as long as your comment is constructive, on topic, not an extended discussion, and civil, it's going to stay around (with very few exceptions)." And yet the first comment I posted on this answer was constructive, on topic, being just one comment, clearly not an extended discussion, and was civil. It just pointed out something you did wrong, so you or another mod deleted it, because it makes you look bad. – Servy Jul 31 '19 at 22:50
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    @Shog9 While I'd like to trust our moderators, the length of time they've had their position, no mechanism for the community to recall a moderator, and the fact that not every moderator participates in meta or will see every case leads to a lack of oversight. Coupled with the questionable actions being taken right here in this very thread, I've got a severe lack of faith in these moderators. I'm well aware that 10K rep can see deleted answers, but we're clearly not talking about answers. – mason Jul 31 '19 at 23:40
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    I am talking about answers, because if you're concerned about this they are your best option, @mason. I had this same argument with Jeff a decade ago; there's a reason comments have been documented as "temporary" for as long as I've been here. – Shog9 Aug 1 '19 at 1:08
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    @Shog9 But the problem is with oversight of moderator actions as related to comments. That's what this whole thing has been about. The title is "Should the mod team tight up moderation on comments". You can say they're ephemeral all you want, but that doesn't mean they should be cleaned up without a good reason. And I'm not seeing good reasons for why a lot of the comments in this very question have been removed. – mason Aug 1 '19 at 1:43
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    If the mod team decides that comment exchanges are going to be either brief or temporary - which is their prerogative, as they're tasked with moderating those threads - then that's what you have to work with, @mason. – Shog9 Aug 1 '19 at 1:56
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    @Shog9 I only have 2 problems with the idea of "post an answer/question" if you have a problem with how a moderator handled comments: 1. it is hard to find deleted comments (even your own) so its hard to really get the context (and at least one mod is demanding a direct link making it impossible). – LinkBerest Aug 1 '19 at 2:45
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    Note, I also feel that I once again must add - I have a great deal of trust in the majority of the moderation team here. But recent incidents have made me question (including literally asking other developers I know) this with a few – LinkBerest Aug 1 '19 at 2:49

So you want to remove the "derailing, snarky, and non-constructive" comments. I think that's going to be used really really improperly. Let's settle with blasting the snarky, offensive, and useless comments to the bitbucket and leave the others. If a thread derails, move thread to chat.

Right now, things have gone so far that the comment voting is working better than the post voting. We can't afford to lose it.

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    Can you clarify why you think it is going to be “used inappropriately”? Your post also seems to contradict itself; you think removing comments won’t work properly and you want to start with deleting the same categories of comments? Please edit your answer to make those points clearer. – Martijn Pieters Mod Jul 30 '19 at 23:50
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    @MartijnPieters: I think we need to pick a more conservative set of comments to remove. Non-constructive has multiple meanings, some of the meanings would be comments I would want to keep, and some not so much. So I picked a set of words harder to misinterpret. – Joshua Jul 31 '19 at 0:24
  • Here I want to uses word analogous to nondetermistic for a comment worth keeping that some would call non-constructive. A hundred on-topic comments seems like a good thing to me. – Joshua Jul 31 '19 at 0:26
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    I'm sorry, but "snark" is not definable. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 31 '19 at 2:59
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    @Draco18s: Perhaps not. It's also the only word I lifted from the proposal in the question. – Joshua Jul 31 '19 at 3:02

Meta is a discussion area. We have been using a Q&A site engine to run it. Let's try using a discussion site engine instead.

I don't know what a good choice is these days, but if this is not working out, let's pick one that is the best in 2019.

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    I like the idea, but it doesn't seem likely. This would require significant dev hours and consensus across the company, which is lacking at this point in time. So good idea, but I don't think it can work here. – Cullub Jul 31 '19 at 12:58
  • I think whatever we do has to be fully built inside SO, using an external service is not a good idea. – DavidG Jul 31 '19 at 13:02
  • so what, are we just going to give up? Because making such changes is "too big" or not in line with the expenses or the business (selling a Q&A engine instances to other businesses) the company is willing to devote to this, is it better to still try and fix what has been broken and clearly got very bad lately? At some point you have to invoke the sunk cost fallacy. I wonder when if ever the time for it will come. – user1306322 Jul 31 '19 at 13:23
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    The fact that Meta was squeezed into the Q/A pattern is a point that I also mentioned in my answer. It's IMHO one source of some of the problems that we see. Some of the problems are probably supposed to be tackled by ... whatever this question is trying to convey ... more deletions, probably. But this will, at best, hide the symptoms of the (deeper, technical and organizational(!)) problem. It's clear that SO won't be able to just snap their fingers and have a nice, approproate place for civilized discussion and discourse. Ooops. Hello, Jeff Atwood. – Marco13 Jul 31 '19 at 14:41

Given the announced change in direction/relationship/weight given to Meta, and the presumed need for something that this post suggests, perhaps the real solution being implied here is that Meta just be retired.

If the current level of mod management is considered insufficient, but the very nature of meta such that sometimes off-the-wall notions become the seedlings for actually good ideas - but that very kind of participation is now relegated to second-tier (if that?) status, it seems the overarching theme is that Meta just ain't Meta anymore, and as such should just be retired. If it changes too much, people will just stop contributing anyway, which would make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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