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In this answer, the entire comment thread was moved to chat and then later there were more comments which were deleted with the comment "respect the move to chat." It seems like the presence of a few chatty comments by a user or two is all it takes to completely and permanently remove the comment section from a question or answer. Shouldn't we only move "chatty" comments to chat and keep the ability of users to make constructive comments on a question or answer? The obvious downside of chat being that highly voted constructive suggestions for improvement on a question will be hard to find in a long stream. What I am looking for is reasons for a blanket and permanent rather than a selective movement of comments to chat.

Note: I agree with the decision to move the referenced answer's comments to chat in the first place; it did get chatty.

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The short answer is that it's way less work to move all comments to chat than it is to sort through 20+ comments, understand them in the context of the question and answer, and make a judgement call on whether they're needed.

When I'm more motivated, I usually try to read the first few comments, and only delete comments that don't have much to do with the answer and comments that have turned into a side-conversation.

If this happens, it doesn't mean that you can't ever leave comments on the answer or question, but you should probably be extra judicious about your comments. I'm assuming that Phillip left his "respect the move to chat." comment because the comments got chatty again beyond what is called for on typical comment threads.

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  • I'm glad I just misunderstood the situation and that it's appropriate to leave constructive comments on a question which has previously had its comments moved to chat.
    – lazarusL
    Jun 2, 2017 at 14:27
  • Adding to Sam's answer @lazarusL, the mod UI is also pretty clunky here. You have move all comment to chat, the scroll up to the top of the post to click a button to show the deleted comments, then scroll down to the comments, and then manually undelete those you want to keep. It's painful; especially if there are a whole bunch of comments. It doesn't encourage you to "delete all comments except those two useful ones".
    – user11249
    Jun 2, 2017 at 22:35

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