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Rephrasing Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand, I feel that the world is awash in comments, but not answers...

It is also worth noting that immediately condensing all the comments would likely be impractical, because this approach has been already tried in the past and turned out rather troublesome, see Comments: Top n Shown.

Rephrasing Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand, I feel that the world is awash in comments, but not answers...

It is also worth noting that immediately condensing all the comments would likely be impractical, because this approach has been already tried in the past and turned out rather troublesome, see Comments: Top n Shown.

##Answers should prevail

###Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A system.

##Pruning comments

##Word of caution

Answers should prevail

Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A system.

Pruning comments

Word of caution

comments: 42 | comments upvotes: 122 | last posted: yesterday | expand

1. well, clicks "expand", making an unambiguous indication of desire to view these
2. clicks some comment URL, which unambiguously indicates the need to show this specific comment

Be prepared to deal with it. I'd go as far as suppose that without measures to tame mentioned shock, such a change is at high risk of rolling back. I would expect brute-force implementation to cause much turmoil, even more than massive and immediately visible deletes and review abuse caused in the recent past.

One possible way to tame the shock could be to collapse comments only a day or two after the post creation (or after whatever is average period of active commenting on created posts). This will give users sedative feeling of being able to use comments in a familiar way, like nothing has changed.

comments: 42 | comments upvotes: 122 | last posted: yesterday | expand

1. well, clicks "expand", making an unambiguous indication of desire to view these
2. clicks some comment URL, which unambiguously indicates the need to show this specific comment

Be prepared to deal with it. I'd go as far as suppose that without measures to tame mentioned shock, such a change is at high risk of rolling back. I would expect brute-force implementation to cause much turmoil, even more than massive and immediately visible deletes and review abuse caused in the recent past.

One possible way to tame the shock could be to collapse comments only a day or two after the post creation (or after whatever is average period of active commenting on created posts). This will give users sedative feeling of being able to use comments in a familiar way, like nothing has changed.