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    Do you own an eye tracker? (Or know someone who could lend one?) Commented Dec 5, 2013 at 18:53
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    I'm glad to see comments are getting so much attention these days after years of being considered "third class citizens". Is this your doing? :) Commented Dec 5, 2013 at 19:53
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    @ShaWizDowArd: Yes. It's been my first big project on the job so far and something I've been thinking a lot about since August (of 2012 ;-). I wouldn't be pushing this so hard if I didn't think we could come up with a solution that's much better than the current system. As a company, we are getting more scientific in our approach to new features, which is very good. The cost is that we are probably going to be more methodical about changing things like how we display comments. Commented Dec 5, 2013 at 21:37
  • @Flexo: I don't, but I'm sure we could try using one if we had a good enough reason. How would you propose using eye tracking to test this? (I honestly can't picture how it would be useful.) Commented Dec 5, 2013 at 21:50
  • @Jon missed that old request of yours! Well, good luck with your project, hope we can come with something here soon. Commented Dec 5, 2013 at 23:09
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    I was thinking of using an eye tracker to quantify time spend looking at comments vs scrolling time. If people don't dwell on comments much, but have to scroll past them to read content a lot then they just block valuable space. Commented Dec 6, 2013 at 6:54
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    @Flexo Is this really a problem outside of meta (where arguably comments should be looked at completely differently)? Max of 5 comments are shown by default on an answer. Hopefully a given answer is longer than that, in most cases. I don't think scrolling past a bunch of comments is a problem (at least not on all sites. If you think it is on SO then I will acknowledge that you have better cause to know that than I do). Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 3:35
  • The question uses the word "signal" twice, perhaps in mutually opposite meanings, for reasons of grammar or some semantic shortcut that I did not make out. Would you equate "signal" with "comments", or with "comment hiding"? That is, what quantity(ies) do you want to measure? Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 12:02
  • Are you guys still looking at ways to clean up/hide trivial comments? Or perhaps ways to more easily clean out obsolete comments (mods don't like to touch them if they are over a specific length, even if the post has already been updated in response). Haven't seen any more posts in a while. Commented Dec 16, 2015 at 23:39