tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Comments that vanish)

Grétar Amazeen comments on "Comments that vanish" (3649)

2010-03-04T09:39:57-08:00

So I was the owner of "I can't imagine why anybody would say that this question looks like homework." in the question about quantum groups and homotopical language. The question had some statement saying "and please don't reply that this question is inappropriate for MO because it looks like a homework problem". My comment was meant positively as it did not look like a homework problem (whether there were other problems with the question is not really relevant here). After I saw that Scott edited the question and removed this line I was going to remove my comment myself, so it's not that I think it should still be there. But since it was far from inflammatory I think the responsibility of deleting it should have been mine.

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (3647)

2010-03-04T06:25:46-08:00

I leave my principles to be involved with serious things---and voting on internet sites is, well, not among those.

Storkle comments on "Comments that vanish" (3646)

2010-03-04T06:18:39-08:00

Mariano: "The only sane etiquette I see as worth developing in the site is to vote, to encourage people to actually vote up and down (There are question with more than 1 kiloviews and 9 votes!)"

You are aware, Mariano, that anyone can look at your profile and see that you have cast a miniscule number of votes in proportion to your participation? I have a hard time believing you are being serious. I thought not voting much was a matter of principle for you until now...

José Figueroa comments on "Comments that vanish" (3645)

2010-03-04T05:50:50-08:00

That seems like a lot of work for Scott. I really don't mind that my comment was removed after it ceased being relevant (assuming it ever was). I'd have preferred being told about it, though.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Comments that vanish" (3632)

2010-03-03T22:19:09-08:00

The only sane etiquette I see as worth developing in the site is to vote, to encourage people to actually vote up and down

I agree. The MO community is actually quite good about voting freely. According to the SE "top sites" leatherboard, MO posts get an average of 3.8 upvotes in the first 24 hours they're up.

I've gotta say: I think this policy is way too interventionist. I can understand isolated conversations that really get off the rails, and which is of general benefit to delete. But I don't think it's a good idea, or a worthwhile use of moderator time, to "clean up" a discussion like this when nothing untoward happened.

I agree that just deleting the comments without a trace was pretty creepy, but I can sympathize with the desire to "clean up" a comment thread. It's annoying to have to wade through a list of irrelevant comments and fish out the ones that are worthwhile, and I don't think it's a waste of time to do something about it. After all, it's not a waste of time to vote answers up and down, the main purpose of which is to sort out the best answers so that people can get to the good stuff. Similarly, it's not a waste of time to vote up comments, which visually distinguishes them so that it's easier for people to find them later (indeed, in long comment threads, only the five most highly voted comments appear unless you ask for more). We don't have a way to downvote comments, but that's what Scott really wanted to do: mark those comments so that they would be easier to ignore somehow.

I think deleting somebody else's comment is far too likely to come across as a violation, so we shouldn't do it. Given that deleted comments are completely invisible even to the comment owner and to moderators, I think moderators should shoulder the overhead of sending an email to (or leaving a comment for) the comment owner to confirm before deleting a comment.

In the case of the quantum groups books question, the comments were pretty meta. What do people think about the following approach? If Scott (or another moderator) really thinks the comments interfere with the actual math going on in the thread, he pastes them into a new thread here on meta, deletes them, and leaves a comment to the effect of "I've moved the first four comments to http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussions/1234". My intuition is that most people would be okay with that, but if not, please speak up.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Comments that vanish" (3630)

2010-03-03T21:39:16-08:00

Oh, and re: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/16977/why-do-my-quantum-group-books-avoid-homotopical-language, I honestly don't remember which comments I deleted! I think it was actually along exactly the same lines -- someone complaining about a mysterious downvote, and at the time I arrived the vote total was healthily positive. If the protagonists care, we can reconstruct the comments using our new database dump superpowers!

As a demonstration of those superpowers (I finally got ahold of the dump I asked for), Scott deleted the first four comments on that thread. They were

Why was this question downvoted? It seems a valid question to me. 394
--
I can't imagine why anybody would say that this question looks like homework. 135
--
The only reason I can imagine for a downvote --- I voted +1 --- is that it takes a while to get to a question (and the title isn't posed as a question). 78
--
Is the only reasonable reason for a downvote that the question be homework? 1409

Scott Morrison comments on "Comments that vanish" (3628)

2010-03-03T21:12:21-08:00

Also, @Mariano, re: " it'd be useful to have questions and answers also display the total number of votes cast"

This is, I understand, implemented on StackOverflow -- at least for users above some reputation threshold (I suspect the threshold is a hack to limit server load, as this operation isn't database friendly for historical reasons). Quite possibly, after we come out of beta, the StackExchange folk will be migrating features over from StackOverflow. We may just gain this as part of this migration, we may have to go ask for it, I'm not sure.

Ben Webster comments on "Comments that vanish" (3627)

2010-03-03T21:10:58-08:00

I've gotta say: I think this policy is way too interventionist. I can understand isolated conversations that really get off the rails, and which is of general benefit to delete. But I don't think it's a good idea, or a worthwhile use of moderator time, to "clean up" a discussion like this when nothing untoward happened.

Scott Morrison comments on "Comments that vanish" (3626)

2010-03-03T21:10:33-08:00

@Mariano, re: "The only sane etiquette I see as worth developing in the site is to vote, to encourage people to actually vote up and down"

Actually I agree on this point: while downvoting without explaining is definitely a problem (perhaps not generally, but often in specific cases), the overall low rate of voting is something that I'd be much happier about improving.

Scott Morrison comments on "Comments that vanish" (3625)

2010-03-03T21:07:19-08:00

Oh, and re: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/16977/why-do-my-quantum-group-books-avoid-homotopical-language, I honestly don't remember which comments I deleted! I think it was actually along exactly the same lines -- someone complaining about a mysterious downvote, and at the time I arrived the vote total was healthily positive. If the protagonists care, we can reconstruct the comments using our new database dump superpowers!

Scott Morrison comments on "Comments that vanish" (3623)

2010-03-03T21:05:17-08:00

Okay, sorry, about the cryptic reply a moment ago.

Regarding the comments above the Anton could salvage (fpqc and jose): By the time I got the the question, the total vote count was at +6 (where it stands right now, I think). As such, I thought the comment "why is this being downvoted?" was no longer relevant. I stopped to check for systematic downvoting against fpqc, which has been a problem in the past, found nothing and decided to delete both comments. Deleting fpqc's was fine: at some point I received explicit permission from him to delete his comments when I felt it appropriate, and that hasn't been retracted. Deleting Jose's was, I agree, especially seeing the kerfuffle in this thread, problematic.

Personally, I would prefer an explicit policy that questions which concern the operation of mathoverflow, rather then mathematics, may be deleted by moderators when they feel that the comments are no longer relevant, or indeed otherwise at their discretion! I acted today on the mistaken presumption that this was okay.

Now, going forward, I'll be much more careful to leave my own comment, to the effect that I've deleted part of a comment thread, for some reason. I've done this several times in the past when comment threads have got out of hand, and I think this has been well-received, or at least acceptable. Further, I'll be more hesitant to delete others comments at all. Earlier in the life of mathoverflow, quite a few times I'd emailed the authors of a batch of comments I thought were either inappropriate or no longer relevant, and proposed that I delete all of them. To my memory, this was always agreed on. More recently, I guess I've had slightly less enthusiasm for the overhead incurred, and just been bold.

Leaving aside that fact that I didn't explain what I was doing, which I absolutely agree would have been better, I think one important difference we might be having here is our intents. The authors of the comments are writing them in order to have a conversation. I've been deleting them in order to optimise the long-term value of the page to other readers. There's some balance to be struck here, and I'm keen to hear where people think it should lie.

Ben Webster comments on "Comments that vanish" (3622)

2010-03-03T21:03:28-08:00

OK. Awkward. Well, I'm not censoring anything.

Harry Gindi comments on "Comments that vanish" (3621)

2010-03-03T20:47:23-08:00

I had a feeling it was you! I'm sure you meant well though.

Scott Morrison comments on "Comments that vanish" (3619)

2010-03-03T20:41:51-08:00

No no, I was on a deleting rampage. I don't have time to explain now, but it seemed reasonable at the time, and I won't delete any comments for a while, until we've sorted this out.

Ben Webster comments on "Comments that vanish" (3618)

2010-03-03T20:34:23-08:00

Just to be clear, the staff is not censoring anything. I'm as confused as anyone else; my best guess is that someone went on a flagging rampage.

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (3616)

2010-03-03T20:25:48-08:00

The other downvote question José did not understand was mine, on http://mathoverflow.net/questions/16977/why-do-my-quantum-group-books-avoid-homotopical-language. The first paragraph in Zoran Škoda's answer perfectly describes my reason.

I really do not see why it is sensible to vote up without explaining oneself and not to vote down without explaining oneself...

The only sane etiquette I see as worth developing in the site is to vote, to encourage people to actually vote up and down (There are question with more than 1 kiloviews and 9 votes!---of course, I cannot tell whether 9=509-500 or 9-0, it'd be useful to have questions and answers also display the total number of votes cast, for otherwise the numbers are essentially meaningless)

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Comments that vanish" (3614)

2010-03-03T20:05:48-08:00

Incidentally, I see that I have a copy of that question open in another tab where the comments still appear. In case somebody is following and curious, the comments were

Thanks for the -1, guy. – fpqc 2 hours ago
Why is this question being downvoted? That's the second down vote today that I don't understand. – José Figueroa-O'Farrill 2 hours ago

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Comments that vanish" (3613)

2010-03-03T20:03:17-08:00

Yikes! What the heck is going on? There's no way those comments could have been flagged offensive, but I find it hard to imagine that one of the moderators is deleting them. I'm having trouble getting a copy of the database. Once I get it, I'll be able to see who cast what kinds of votes on what and when. I requested a fresh dump just after I saw Grétar's comment above, so it probably won't have the most recent mysteriously vanishing comments, but it should have enough to figure out what's happening.

Harry Gindi comments on "Comments that vanish" (3607)

2010-03-03T19:26:26-08:00

My comment and José Figueroa-O'Farrill's comment were deleted over at my question Is Lang's definition of the tensor bundle nonstandard. Has someone on the staff been censoring comments related to down-votes?

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Comments that vanish" (3605)

2010-03-03T17:53:34-08:00

I did not agree to anything...

Sorry, then I misunderstood what happened.

These mysteriously vanishing comments are very strange. I'll try to track them down and see what's going on.

José Figueroa comments on "Comments that vanish" (3602)

2010-03-03T15:31:46-08:00

Ditto. A comment of mine asking about why a question was downvoted was also deleted. Is such a comment deemed inappropriate? Other comments in that thread are clearly in response to my comment, but now they appear a little out of place.

Grétar Amazeen comments on "Comments that vanish" (3596)

2010-03-03T13:00:22-08:00

Well somebody just deleted a comment of mine. It was very civil, but had become redundant because of some edits to the question. But it should have been my decision to delete it.

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (3594)

2010-03-03T12:50:51-08:00

I did not agree to anything...

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Comments that vanish" (3593)

2010-03-03T12:35:20-08:00

@Mariano: I agree with you, but in this example, the comments were not removed unilaterally. Everyone involved agreed to kill the comment thread. Deleting comment threads (even with everybody's permission) should still probably be a very rare occurrence since comments are minimally disruptive (they don't bump the thread and you see at most five of them unless you want to see more). I think the best thing to do if there's an argument in the comments is to leave a comment asking the participants to take it someplace else. If a comment thread really gets out of hand, moderators can also lock a post, which prevents anybody from adding comments (but also prevents the post from being edited or voted on).

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (3592)

2010-03-03T12:02:16-08:00

Armed with some recent experience, I have to change that: rather than suboptimal, I think that unilaterally removing other people's comments is close to a pessimal strategy...

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (2144)

2010-01-27T10:12:57-08:00

@Scott: Oh, I don't think it was wrong, only suboptimal.

Disagreement is part of mathematics, as far as it is a human activity. For example, the debate on the merits of Bourbaki is not the exclusive realm of overzealous undergradates in the search of more useful causes, and it has involved great titans---sometimes in much harsher terms than what we saw here, and in much more public and holy places (MR!). Keeping the site focused on its purpose, which is not to be a discussion site, is extremely good, but if it is to play even small role as the public face of mathematics, then I see no reason to hide the lively disagreements we do have :D

Steve Huntsman comments on "Comments that vanish" (2143)

2010-01-27T09:44:16-08:00

Scott--I think you did a good thing, in a very reasoned way. Do it again when the situation merits.

Scott Morrison comments on "Comments that vanish" (2142)

2010-01-27T09:31:33-08:00

Yeah -- I'm certainly the culprit here. I agree that the conversation was always civil -- I was a little over-active here just because we've had some recent complaints (via private email). If the consensus here is that this mass deletion (with permission from everyone!) was the wrong course, I'll happily not try it again, and just try to add a comment asking that the discussion end.

Steve Huntsman comments on "Comments that vanish" (2140)

2010-01-27T09:13:36-08:00

I agree with Andy, there's certainly nothing wrong with moderators making polite private requests for takedowns. I would be concerned about taking unilateral action, though. Civil arguments are good! And I don't think this argument was uncivil at any point, but maybe my threshold is high.

FYI I started the comment thread. Scott Morrison emailed me and the other folks with those comments and asked if we'd mind if he took them down as a piece to avoid discontinuities that would be caused by individual takedowns. I said it was fine by me, and I presume the others did as well.

Since the email was sent not only to me but others I don't have any qualms about presenting the main text below:

[Scott] I think the discussion on the comment thread about Bourbaki added nothing to mathoverflow. I propose that all 3 of you give me permission to delete the thread. (Please don't act unilaterally; I'd prefer that that everything stays than that the thread is partially dismembered.) Of course, no compulsion, I'll forget about the matter shortly. :-)

[Me] I'm OK with you deleting it. Sorry for stirring up a hornet's nest there!...and thanks for working on MO.

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (2136)

2010-01-26T23:43:13-08:00

There is little to be learned from something that one cannot see.

Andy Putman comments on "Comments that vanish" (2135)

2010-01-26T23:33:14-08:00

I actually think the current policy is a good one. I try to maintain a policy of "don't argue on the internet", and I usually regret it when I get sucked into one . Killing off threads when they become argumentative or off-topic is a good check on that temptation. It also helps keep the discussion polite and high-minded. Since this site plays a small role in the "public face of mathematics", I think maintaining that is important.

I'm now going to go to bed...

Mariano comments on "Comments that vanish" (2134)

2010-01-26T22:57:22-08:00

The comments on question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/13089/ strayed a bit away from the question's subject (it was not hard to foretell this, for the subject is contentious and as such it will tend to focus on concrete examples which make for good examples!)

Strangely, instead of letting the mini-thread die off by simply ignoring it, the whole set of comments vanished. I asked what had happened, and Andy Putman explained.

Is there not a non-destructive way to deal with this type of situation? Does the software not allow, say, locking comments? Was the simple-minded approach of clearly stating in a comment that the off-topic discussion was out of place? (I don't know: maybe someone did say that, but I did not see it before the whole thing disappeared...)

It did seem to me rather, hmm, abrupt...