Post History

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 with 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.