I will be going through my backlog of comments (slowly) and reviewing them, editing good stuff into posts as needed and then deleting. I hope this will give me some new insight into the comment environment and my place in it. (And I'll try not to spam the "active" page with a lot of old questions.)
I will be going through my backlog of comments (slowly) and reviewing them, editing good stuff into posts as needed and then deleting. I hope this will give me some new insight into the comment environment and my place in it. (And I'll try not to spam the "active" page with a lot of old questions.)
This is really cool maths, and I did take some time to reflect. It led me to think about a few points of confusion and lack of skill I suffer from (maybe some others do too?), and I'd like to share them in case it's helpful to anyone else. I think some of these might be worth expanding into their own meta posts if I'm not the only one who suffers from them.
I often have trouble pulling out the useful bits from comments and editing them into a question; I really try, but sometimes I feel totally inept and it seem like leaving the comments is preferable--but then of course, they're cluttering things up and will probably vanish eventually so the value is lost entirely. There might be room on meta for a question about how to effectively edit useful comment stuff into answers so more comments can get flagged as obsolete. I think part of this is because when comments turn into dialogues it's harder to pull useful info out of them, which leads me to the next point.
The citizens who frequent the chat rooms recently got a (entirely justified) chastisement about overusing the ability to invite users to chat in order to help improve questions or answers. But now I, at least, have stopped doing that pretty much altogether. I try to use comments instead--and again, I try to flag as obsolete once the work is done, but it flies in the face of what a mod on another site once told me: "If you go back and forth more than once on a single post, take it to chat, you've basically exhausted the usefulness of comments at that point." That does seem accurate. But it leaves me either misusing comments, misusing chat, or leaving low-quality posts lying around that could really shine with a bit of dialogue on how to polish them. (The last time I felt comments of this sort were going to run into a conversation, I instead flagged for a mod hoping they'd leave some pithy and edifying "how to follow guidelines" comment as I've seen them do expertly in the past, but they thought I was asking for it to be deleted. That was awkward.) I have no idea where to find a "best practices" guideline on this, if it exists. If it doesn't, maybe we can work on that.
Recognising if a comment is useful and appropriate is not always easy or obvious to me when I'm in the thick of it. I really appreciate Brian's point above that "If you're responding to a comment on your own answer, try to edit your answer first, then flag that comment for deletion." This is an example of what I'd like to see more of: instead of just telling me what's bad, help me recognise symptoms of that behaviour and offering explicit alternatives (and I'm totally cool with "take a deep breath and close the tab while you make some tea" as an alternative). AlexP's "comments are for requesting, not sharing, info" is also a great bit of advice along these lines, as it helps me recognise whether my comment is suited to the medium. I'm not all that great at self-examination and some pointers would be good--maybe this could be the subject of another meta post where citizens can offer what they've learned through experience?
Comments as rules clarifications. There's a whole subcategory of comment which seems to consist of "you're not SEing right." And the comment is usually true, and polite, and helps the person figure out how SE works and become a better citizen. They seem to improve the site's quality and I don't know of any more appropriate way to convey that information. IS this an appropriate use of comments? If not, what alternative behaviour should we have when we see someone with a simple misunderstanding of how SE works? And if so, these don't need to stick around forever, so when do I flag them as obsolete? The person who needs to see it won't respond if they're using comments right. I suppose I could start a bookmark folder with my comments to come back to flag as obsolete after a month, but I'm sure I'll forget. Maybe a whole new meta post on 'educational/corrective comments' would be good too--I know they're not inherently wrong because I see mods using them, but they do seem like a corner case which could use some clarification.