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  • 52
    Oh, wow. That's an absolutely fantastic question. We'll have a bunch of comments that may well have a bunch of code block formatting in them. If they were to go back to normal comment design, that'd be lost/look janky. What happens to them is a great question. Commented Apr 28 at 18:00
  • 53
    There'll also (I'm not even going to say 'probably' here, I'm that sure) be a whole backlog of stuff that would've been flagged but wasn't because NLN flagging was disabled. What's the plan for cleaning up those broken windows as fast as possible? Commented Apr 28 at 18:32
  • 15
    Or is the plan to just not, and this isn't really an experiment at all? Commented Apr 29 at 15:07
  • 30
    And indeed, what happens to threaded comments? I can't see threading being lost, and nor can I see the coding effort for threading being wasted either. This is not an experiment. Commented Apr 29 at 16:12
  • 18
    Their primary metric for success is increased engagement with comments. Lowering the rep limit to comment and making comments more prominent is all-but-guarenteed to increase engagement, therefore the experiment is successful and we can keep the changes... Commented Apr 30 at 19:58
  • 2
    That we still do not have a response to this after a (work-)week is severely disappointing. As there was no reason given for the absence of a response either, I currently interpret this to mean that SE either entirely failed to think about this very obvious issue and have been scrambling since monday to find a solution to this huge hole in their plan, or do not want to answer this for whatever reason (e.g. maybe they never intended this as an "experiment" to begin with but as a permanent addition disguised as one). Neither option is inspiring any confidence in the SE development process. Commented May 2 at 13:14
  • 2
    @l4mpi Or they just didn't get to it/didn't consider it sufficiently important/whatever - it's by far not the first time things like that stay unanswered for a while. That doesn't automatically mean they have an issue with answering that question specifically. If you look at other answers here, this is not the only one without a staff response. Commented May 2 at 14:20
  • 1
    @dan1st my point is that by not answering this question about an issue which has the potential to leave the site littered with broken content, SE are increasing my doubts about this feature request, which were already substantial before that. The specific reason for not answering does not really matter; if the reason is that they do not consider this to be important enough, that doesn't inspire any more confidence in their development process either. Commented May 5 at 8:01
  • 2
    I think "it's too hard to undo this" will end up being a significant deciding factor, irrespective of whether or not there any 'improvement' in 'engagement'. Commented May 5 at 11:19
  • 1
    This will depend on how the experiment goes. If things go very well then we wouldn't take any action to remove any content. But if things don't go so well or things go very poorly, we would look at removing content. We will be sampling the comments to see what ends up being left though. Commented May 12 at 17:13
  • 6
    @Hoid "we would look at removing content" - so your plan to deal with nested comments if the experiment fails is to delete all of them? That sounds like nobody considered this question important enough to create a solid plan to deal with it before announcing the experiment, which is just as bad as I expected. OTOH I expect the experiment to be declared a success regardless of the actual impact of the change, so the question is probably irrelevant anyways... Commented May 13 at 11:42