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How are we supposed to give feedback for poor questions if such comments are deleted?
The question https://software.codidact.com/posts/281517 is currently voted at -3. I wrote several comments to explain why, so the author can hopefully ask better questions in the future.
This morning, I found all but the first of these comments deleted without warning.
Alexei gave the following reason:
I have removed the comments that are not relevant. Please use comments to ask for clarifications or generally speaking, to improve the question.
Taken literally, this means that we are not allowed to tell people why a question is downvoted, because that's neither a clarification, nor intended to improve this question.
How are people supposed to learn how to ask better questions if we are not allowed to give them feedback?
Also, I spent quite a bit of time writing these comments, which is now wasted. If you disagree with my comments, could you ask me about them before deleting them?
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
Providing feedback can be done using comments. However, these comments are supposed to add constructive criticism and/or links to relevant resources. Your first comment does exactly this and it is a useful one.
However, the subsequent comments seem to be a debate around available Wikipedia translations and how an answer would look like, rather than suggesting how to improve the question.
Never-ending streams of comments are not particularly useful. If you find the question not useful and your comment does not lead to improving it, you can just downvote and move on.
If the question is off-topic, it can be flagged to be closed.
I remember reading @meriton's comments on that question and thinking they were good feedback; if I hadn't seen them there, I would have written something similar.
This is also an argument against making question feedback private: which is more likely to make people feel defensive, receiving public criticism from one person or being dog-piled privately by six? With public feedback, I can see that what needs to be said has been, and there's no need to join in (although it would be nice to be able to upvote comments that I cosign, rather than saying it with complicit silence).
Good feedback often involves some argumentation, and arguments can be digressive as the reasons behind viewpoints get explored. This is a good thing; forbidding digressive argumentation would limit both the feedback we can give to posters and what we can learn from them as feedback-givers.
Having a policy of cleaning up digressive comment threads eventually would make some amount of sense—anything we want preserved should end up as an edit to actual content, after all. But the threads need to survive long enough for the discussion about what to do with the content to reach some level of consensus (or recognition that consensus can't be reached, which results in either the commenter being ignored or the question being closed). One day is much too short to assume that this has been accomplished, in my opinion.
So in summary:
- I think question feedback should be delivered in public comments (the status quo).
- It would be nice if those comments could be upvoted.
- The feedback is allowed to be digressive while consensus is pursued.
- The feedback should persist for a period of time sufficient to reach consensus.
- I don't know exactly what that period of time should be, but I think it's longer than one day.
- After that period of time, digressive comments can be deleted.
1 comment thread