Why are we moving all the comments to chat?

Question

I've seen a lot of lengthy comments sections being moved en masse to chat. The reason I discovered this site and began relying on it and eventually joined it was because of a comment by tchrist on the Q Pronunciation of 'aunt' in the US.

I must second @JohnLawler’s plea: please please please use standard notation. IPA is not that hard, at least for English phonemic purposes. I believe the five American pronunciations of the word aunt are /eɪnt/, /ænt/, /ant/, /ɒnt/, and /ɔnt/. See, those aren’t that hard, are they? And now we all know what everyone is talking about.

This has been indispensable in explaining concept of the "two" pronunciations of "aunt" to people when it comes up.

Often the comments provide clarification that is never recorded in the question or answer, or they provide counter-evidence as to why the answers are not complete or possibly incorrect entirely. Many times they address side issues that do not directly answer the question, and thus, cannot be offered as answers. Trying to pack all that additional information into the question, likewise, can lead to confusion.

Moving the entire thread to chat loses this nuance that is essential to the usefulness of the site.

If there is chit-chat, off-topic commenting, or extended conversation happening, those individual comments need to be removed independently of the often vital comments with useful information.

Can a guideline be established?

Answer 1

Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum

You're probably expecting lasting discussions here because of how common discussion sites are on the internet. What you may not realize is that we are supposed to be something quite different from that! There are many other places on the internet that provide suitable forums for discussions, but Stack Exchange is not one of them. If you make it one of those, you'll break what it is good for, what it was founded for.

No matter how much they might wish to do so, site users, including volunteer moderators, are no more able to change the key corporate policy that discussion goes only in chat, not in ever-growing comments to a question or answer, than we are able to change the policy that meta matters do not belong on the main site.

Stack Exchange was created to solve a particular problem: the way discussion forums hide "meaningful nuance" in comment threads, and this makes it impossible to find actual answers to actual questions. All else follows from that.

Therefore it is not possible to turn our question-and-answer site into one that's a conversation forum, because doing so would violate the very reason that SE exists since it runs counter to those founding principles.

Answer 2

As has already been pointed out above, objections to such moving of comments to chat (or their outright deletion or blocking of further commenting) keep appearing regularly on this meta-site. The standard response has been that the moderators are overworked and cannot spend the time to separate the 'chit-chat, off-topic commenting, or extended conversation' (which the OP agrees should be removed) from the more worthwhile comments, so when they see too much of chit-chat etc. under a post they delete or remove everything. This response makes the practice understandable (the moderators are indeed overworked), but it doesn't really alleviate the sense of frustration that many participants feel about it.

Underlying the conflicts about deleting comments and moving them to chat is a more fundamental disagreement about the role of comments on this site. In the original design of the Stack Exchange, the comments were meant to be analogous to Post-It notes, i.e. temporary. The idea was presumably that, when one thinks that a question or an answer needs clarification/correction/expansion, one would post a comment to that effect and the original poster would then either modify the post accordingly or briefly explain why a modification is not necessary; after that is done, the comment would be of no further significance. Some contributors to this site stick with that original conception of the role of comments, and therefore argue that nobody has any ground to complain about any deletion or removal of comments, because they have never been intended for anything permanent anyway.

While the comments still sometimes perform this role that they were originally intended for, they have over time evolved into something different. As the OP points out many of the comments that appear on this site deserve to be permanent, and it does often happen that what appears in the comments is more illuminating, insightful, and helpful to future visitors than what appears in the answers on the same page. Telling people that whenever they have something important to say on a topic they must post it as an answer doesn't work, because one often has an argument as to why somebody's answer is incorrect or incomplete, without having an alternative answer.

If there is ever going to be a resolution of the problem that the OP brings up, it will depend on whether the original 'Post-it' conception of the comments continues to be insisted on, or it is accepted that it has been overtaken by how the site has developed.

Answer 3

Who gets to decide which comments get to stay and which comments go?

There are no reliable mechanisms for the community to rank comments. They can’t be downvoted. They can only be flagged to be removed, not to be “pinned”. It is not feasible to ask a few volunteer moderators to singlehandedly curate hundreds of thousands of comments and preserve the “valuable” ones with no real consensus from the community, especially when the tools available to them for moderating comments are not designed for that task.

If the community finds comments that are too valuable to risk losing, the only sanctioned way to handle that is to capture that information in an answer or question on the main site or meta.