##Answers should prevail
Rephrasing Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand, I feel that the world is awash in comments, but not answers...
...the world is awash in comments, but not answers. And further is an exact quote:
###Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A system.
I believe prevalence of answers is a fundamental principle of Stack Exchange, its cultural keystone.
The problem is, the way how comments are presented now, jeopardizes above principles, it's that simple.
Long comments threads make it harder to get to and read answers. Not just that but which is probably more dangerous, long comments threads make answers look less important. Assuming that comments tend to stick to popular, highly viewed posts, this may have substantial perception impact.
- Perception wise, a question with 100 comments and 2K views makes the same impact as 100 questions having 1 comment and 20 views. One way or another, there's the same 2000 views, with average ~50 comments shown per view.
You may write 5, 10, 20 posts at SE blog stressing the importance of answers and ephemeral nature of comments, but until things are the way they are now, these will be easily outscored by hundreds of heavily commented posts with thousands views.
You can try to auto-prune / flag / review comments deemed useless until the hell freezes over, but every single "useful" comment you decide to keep visible will serve as invitation to post 10 more comments.
- Let's face it, comments fit the "discussion forum" culture, and that culture is widely popular, fun, appealing and frankly speaking, much easier to follow than answer oriented one. Give it a chance to leak through and it will leak through, and it will compete and corrupt the answer oriented culture. It happens right now and to be honest, I find it is happening to me, all I write here is just how I feel.
I think that if we want to consistently stick with "answers prevail" principles, the right way would be to always show comments condensed (well, almost always to be precise).
comments: 42 | comments upvotes: 122 | last posted: yesterday | expand
Two exceptional cases to expand comments are when user:
- well, clicks "expand", making an unambiguous indication of desire to view these
- clicks some comment URL, which unambiguously indicates the need to show this specific comment
For the sake of completeness, expanded view must always have "collapse" link to toggle view back to "canonical". Otherwise, inability to easy collapse back will punish users preferring to stick with answer-prevail attitude - the very audience who would support and enjoy the culture we are assumed to follow.
Showing comments condensed, no matter useful or not, will help us keep the answer oriented culture.
It's probably even more important to keep useful comments condensed. Useless comments are merely usability annoyance, these at least don't undermine importance of answers. Useful comments are more dangerous in that regard, as these tend to compete and even sometimes replace answers.
##Pruning comments
Well, as long as comments are typically shown condensed, I don't think this will be much important.
##Word of caution
"Total collapse" will most likely be a huge culture shock for those used to see comments expanded (this certainly will be the case for me).
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.
- Another option I considered was to expand comments for a day or two each time post is edited or new comment is posted. That would be even more sedative, but unfortunately it would also open a gate for abuse: people would make senseless edits / comments with sole purpose to trigger expand.