-11

It's the third time this happens, and my comments, in all cases

a) did absolutely NOT contain any discriminatory language, personal remarks or ad-hominem attacks

b) they were pointing, in a playful and polite way, serious abuse -- low quality answers being highly upvoted the first time, and bogus, absurdly trivial questions used only to drive traffic and create dandy targets for easy, "great" answers that are (again) upvoted through the roof, the second and third time.

I regret I didn't take any screenshots.

Are people out there who could just delete comments they personally find superfluous, even if those comments were NOT violating any policy? And if they have this awesome power, have they really nothing better to do than to abuse it?

The history proved me right the first time, and not long time ago, the "pillar of the community" that took umbrage at my comments was unceremoniously kicked out together with their army of sockpuppets.

It should be embarassing for the mods that s/he could do their thing for so long; they better concentrate on that instead of squashing little people like me, which they probably consider expendable.

Update

I think that the answer to my question really clarified whatever may have still been in doubt, and removed whatever naive illusions I might've had.

I would not contribute anything else to this site, ever.

4
  • A: moderators or enough flags
    – sebasth
    Nov 14, 2018 at 10:54
  • 5
    Actually, after posting my answer I went back and checked out some of your comments. Just as a random example, statements like "this answer is GARBAGE" (emphasis yours) is neither playful not polite and is in fact in violation of the policy to be constructive, as well. So while most of your comments were removed because they weren't useful, some were removed because they were actively harmful too.
    – terdon Mod
    Nov 14, 2018 at 16:52
  • 2
    Why don't you give the full content of that comment if you have access to it? (and the context, @goro's answer that was a comment on was unfortunately removed in the last purge). Also what does 'random example', 'most', and 'some' mean? If you're trying to imply that's just an example of a long series of abusive comments of mine and you're just picked one at random, that's a breathtaking LIE. Don't think you're the only one(s) with access to the history. Go on -- remove this comment too. "Control the narrative"
    – qubert
    Nov 15, 2018 at 1:51
  • 4
    Because I didn't want to get into this publicly. That was just a friendly nudge to let you know that some (that means not all) of your comments were rude (some were also flagged by users). I thought leaving a simple comment was better than going the "official" way. So I picked a random example of the rude ones (random here means the first one I saw) to show what I mean by rude. Finally, I clarified that while some of your deleted comments were a bit unpleasant, most (that means >50%) were fine but were deleted because comments are regularly cleaned up as I explain below.
    – terdon Mod
    Nov 15, 2018 at 11:47

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
10

Yes, those people exist: it's us moderators. Comments are ephemeral by design on Stack Exchange. They can and, as you have seen, are deleted without warning. However, we don't just delete comments randomly. We delete them when they aren't providing anything useful. Here is what the Help Center has to say about when you should and should not comment:

When should I comment? You should submit a comment if you want to:

  • Request clarification from the author;
  • Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;
  • Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).

When shouldn't I comment? Comments are not recommended for any of the following:

  • Suggesting corrections that don't fundamentally change the meaning of the post; instead, make or suggest an edit;

  • Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one);

  • Compliments which do not add new information ("+1, great answer!"); instead, up-vote it and pay it forward;

  • Criticisms which do not add anything constructive ("-1, see previous comments you scallywag!"); instead, down-vote (and provide or up-vote a better answer if appropriate);

  • Secondary discussion or debating a controversial point; please use chat instead;

  • Discussion of community behavior or site policies; please use meta instead.

You say your comments were:

pointing, in a playful and polite way, serious abuse -- low quality answers being highly upvoted the first time, and bogus, absurdly trivial questions used only to drive traffic and create dandy targets for easy, "great" answers that are (again) upvoted through the roof, the second and third time.

None of those is a valid reason to post a comment. If you find actual abuse then please flag it for moderator attention. The comment doesn't help. If you consider a post not useful, then downvote it. Again, the comment is not helpful. In other words, the comments you describe were just noise, and didn't provide useful content so they were deleted.

You have simply misunderstood the point of comments on this site:

Are people out there who could just delete comments they personally find superfluous, even if those comments were NOT violating any policy? And if they have this awesome power, have they really nothing better to do than to abuse it?

Superfluous comments are in violation of site policy.

2
  • I appreciate that you have contributed a lot to this site, including deleting inappropriate comments. Just let me ask for a favor. Please delete comments under my posts only if they are offensive or nontechincal. For example, I am looking back to review the technicalities in the comments from Stephen Kitt and me in unix.stackexchange.com/questions/481821/…, which I didn't understand this morning, but they are gone now. Maybe they are not important or helpful to you or most people, but they are to me. Thank you!
    – Tim
    Nov 16, 2018 at 4:49
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    @Tim I am afraid I can't do that. First of all, we usually don't know whose post it is, comments are flagged and we delete them accordingly. More importantly, comments should not be used for discussion like that. The comment thread you linked to was a perfect example of when you should have either taken it to chat or opened a new question.
    – terdon Mod
    Nov 16, 2018 at 10:18
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Since @terdon is trying to spin it using mendacious allusions and ridiculous percentages, here is the reality about my comments.

They were 3 incidents, and 5 messages in total. No more, no less.

I'll try to reproduce them from memory, since I didn't take any screenshots. My comments are in blockquotes. Any suggestions that they were essentially different from this, or there were other "rude" comments of mine are LIES.

If you think they're noise, I heartily agree with you. But the answers they were attached to were/are much worse. I hope that the spam/sockpuppet voting problem in this "community" will be fixed one day and its enablers removed, but I'm personally too disgusted to continue. This is the last message I post here.

1.

The first comment, the one containing the "garbage" outburst, was borne out of frustration, after @goro was peddling for the 4th or 5th time the same non-working awk script, supposed to parse .json files by setting FS to ::

This answer is GARBAGE. Even if the json file is pretty printed with each field on a separate line, it will fail lamentably when the key or the value contain themselves a colon. And BTW, how was this answer so highly voted? By using sock-puppet accounts?

It was containing another 1 or 2 technical remarks about bugs in the script -- I think to the effect of "you should use -v to pass a variable to awk, but I don't remember them exactly. The remark at the end was accurate: the answer, though not working (even with the file at hand), had already 12 or 14 upvotes.

And after @goro, instead of fixing their script, notified me that he had reported my comment and I'll have to suffer the consequences:

LOL. You're upvoting your comments too. Look: if they kick me out and let you do your shtick, that will only make all too clear how things work here.

2.

That was a comment to an "answer" of the form "the stdout device may or may be not copied to the terminal. at some point the stdout device will be turned into pixels and copied (as with cp) but this is an implementation detail".

Yes, and at some point, the panel those pixels are "copied" to will be smashed into pieces and rare metals recovered. Poor pixels! Seriously, is this stuff bot-written?

3.

To a pompous, (highly upvoted) answer to an absurdly trivial question which was asking whether the gsub and sub functions from awk should be "concerned" with records, fields, FS and OFS:

But if you use gsub(".","&&",$1), then $0 will be rebuilt too (using the value of OFS, no less!). So gsub should be "concerned" about fields, records, and OFS (In case someone doesn't get it, this is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. Some questions here look like they're right off festoon(6)).

And finally, my reply to the mean-spirited reaction to it:

This kind of question may have uses. To drive traffic, for instance.

1
  • 9
    Yes, these are very good examples of comments whose tone isn't constructive. I don't understand what you think I am trying to spin here, but since you've posted them publicly, I will ask you again to be more careful with your tone in the future. If you feel something really was abusing the site, flag it for mod attention instead of accusing users of being bots. Even if you're right, we don't need that sort of atmosphere.
    – terdon Mod
    Nov 16, 2018 at 10:22

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