Why were some comments removed?

Question

I was looking on a specific question to see what the latest activity on it was, and I noticed that some comments (including some of my own) have been removed. Normally if comments are removed, a mod posts a comment saying that the comment section is not for extended discussion and they've been moved to chat, but there instead was no notice whatsoever.

I could understand if my comments have been removed for the reason of extended discussion, but I do not think they were offensive. One of my comments had several upvotes on it as well, so I'm wondering why they were removed.

The comments were on this question. Thanks.

Answer 1

I deleted the comments. Any post with more than twenty comments is autoflagged by the system. As a moderator, it's my job to review them and determine if the comments need to be there. In this case, I decided that most of the comments were either unnecessary or tangential. None of them were rude.

Upvotes really don't mean anything when it comes to preserving a comment. A comment being popular doesn't make it not "noise". Comments are ephemeral and not meant to be long-lived. If you want something to stick around, put it in an answer (assuming it is one).

We have a pretty strict policy prohibiting answers in comments here and your first comment was, essentially, that:

@AnonymousNo345 Why don't you ask the other women in the group separately if it offends them? If I say that the women are good at X, that's not a negative thing as long as X is a positive choice a woman could take, whether those women plan on doing X or not. Complimenting women on being housewives is not negative. After all, men ought to serve their wives as much as they serve their husbands. Saying women from a country are good at that is no more offensive than saying the men from the country are good husbands or fathers.

You start with a rhetorical question and then answer it yourself. That's not a comment, that's an answer. Whether it's a good answer or not is up to the community to decide by voting. If you want to understand why these comments aren't allowed, feel free to read the post I linked above.

The remainder of your comments were responses to a question about your "answer" and your response to them. If you'd written a proper answer instead of comments, that request for clarification and your response (preferably in the form of an edit to your answer) would have been fine and dandy.

Since the "discussion" wasn't really worth preserving in my opinion (moderators can only move comments to chat once, so we have to use it carefully), I didn't move the comments to chat, choosing instead to remove them. Please feel free to use your comment as the basis for an answer, if you wish, but please refrain from writing answers in the comments section.

Answer 2

How comments are moderated

Members of the community who have gained 15 reputation are given the permission to flag posts. It's a well discussed policy on SE that comments are not intended to be permanent. As a community our way of implementing this is through flagging. We have three options for flagging comments.

1. Rude or Abusive
2. No Longer Needed
3. In need of Moderator intervention

The "Rude/Abusive" flag is used for comments that violate the Be Nice policy. The "no longer needed" flag is used for comments that are chatty (ex: "+1 I agree"), obsolete (responding to other comments that have been deleted or have been edited into the post), or are otherwise unnecessary. The "moderator attention" flag is used for special cases that aren't handled by the other two flag reasons. A common reason to use this flag is if a large number of comments in a chain need to be handled.

Comments that receive 3 + number of upvotes / 3 flags are automatically deleted, and all other flagged comments are put into a queue that the moderators have access to.

This specific post

The post you mentioned and its answers attracted a lot of unnecessary comments which were removed. A number of those comments were picked up by the chat bot which looks for comments that are likely to be unnecessary. The bot checks all comments on IPS against a set of patterns that have been defined as commonly flaggable. If any of these patterns exist in the comment, it is posted in chat by the bot. The bot DOES NOT cast any flags of it's own. It's a good bet that many of them got flagged and removed by the community without moderator intervention.

Answer 3

I think for some comments we agree they should be removed and no explanation is necessary. This is i.e. the case if there was a comment to clarify and the question or answer was clarified.

But I agree with you that it seems some comments are removed (without any information) by people who have a different view and simply don't like the comment. Some of the recent questions here in meta are about that problem.

I am not a moderator and I don't know how to convince some moderators that their world view is not the only world view. Maybe we should just continue to write comments (within the official limits) and if they get deled write more comments. Maybe after a while the moderators will see that if they delete a comment there will be a new comment and if they delete it again there will be another one. At some stage they should get tired and/or maybe rethink their strategy.

To be clear: I don't ask people to spam comments and I don't ask them to write offensive or troll comments. My idea is that if the moderators see that there are enough people out there with a different world view then they might start to accept that they have not the only valid word view and let people state their opinions without just deleting them.

I don't know how many moderators exist here and how many of them delete comments which they don't like all the time. Maybe there is just one of them who deletes all this.