Why were my flags declined on these clearly "conversational" comments?

Question

Community guidance on comments is clear: comments are ephemeral, intended to live long enough to convey information to either the author of a post, or another person commenting, and no longer. Comments which are conversational are never appropriate, as clearly called out in the flagging UI ("outdated, conversational, or not relevant").

This guidance is reiterated by a current site moderator in What if comments on answers start to grow and look like a forum?, a Q&A posted nine years ago but which appears just as relevant and applicable today as it was when it was first posted.

And yet, when I make an attempt to help improve the site by flagging comments that are no longer needed (and indeed, in most cases should never have been posted in the first place), these flags are often declined. I've let most slide, but the other day an entire group of flags were declined on comments that are egregiously inappropriate and clearly fall into the "No Longer Needed" category. See the comments below How bad is switching derailleur gears under load?, starting with "I have heard that moon is made of cheese and water drips upwards."

Really? A moderator on this site, with the charge to enforce community rules and take action when content violates those rules, made the decision that "I have heard that moon is made of cheese and water drips upwards" not only contributes something constructive, but is such an important contribution that even after the author the post where the comment was posted has read it, the comment needs to remain for posterity?

I am frankly a bit shocked at the latitude moderators on this site take toward preserving comments. The approach taken is drastically different from that I see on other sites in the Stack Exchange network (and of course, especially on Stack Overflow, arguably the model for all other sites). This results in an inordinate amount of clutter under many posts, making it difficult to identify the useful information hidden among all the weeds.

The question:

Why were the flags on these comments declined, what value is it that the moderator felt overrides the normal handling of comments, and assuming this is actually an official policy for this particular Stack Exchange site, where is this departure from the otherwise-standard guidelines documented for this site?

Answer 1

I am the moderator who declined all of those flags. My reasoning was two-part, but fairly straight forward:

1. The comments were less than a day old when they were flagged. This was the primary factor in my decision to reject the flags. Had they been flagged when the question was no longer active, I likely would have deleted them.

2. I try to use a light touch when using my moderation powers. I prefer to let high reputation users do most of the moderation work and address only the most obvious or egregious moderation issues myself. This is consistent with Stack Exchange's Theory of Moderation. Deleting an entire conversation that was active and less than a day old goes against that philosophy.

Expanding on this somewhat and addressing your other points...

"The moon is made of cheese" comment is more relevant than I think you're giving it credit for. The point is that hearing something somewhere should be taken with a grain of salt. It's a relevant point within the discussion. Several other comments are humorous, but also contributed relevant opinions to the conversation - the jokes about shifting under load creating thermonuclear events, for example.

You mention Stack Overflow as the model for the entire Stack Exchange network. This is a mistake. The various Stack Exchange sites are meant to function as independent communities. That's why they have site-specific help pages, meta sites, and moderators. The vast difference in size between sites is one area where the need for independence is both evident and relevant to this particular question.

The sheer size of Stack Overflow means that it requires a heavier hand in moderation. The traffic on SO is literally thousands of times greater than Bicycles. Taking a light approach in moderation there would result in the site simply becoming unusable. Contrast that with Bicycles where a light approach in moderation might leave an thread a little cumbersome, but that's the extent of it.

It's further noteworthy that the heavy-handed approach is not without cost. Stack Overflow, and the SE network at large, has an image problem that is due, at least in part, to its heavy-handed moderation. On a smaller site, such as Bicycles, it's better to prioritize friendliness and community over strict rule enforcement. In this particular case, that meant leaving comments up while the question is active so that the community could bond over a little fun. The comments can always be cleaned up later.

Finally, you state in a comment on Criggie's answer that it should be very rare for a NLN flag to be declined. While I don't entirely agree with that statement, it is, indeed, very rare that I decline them. For the reasons I've stated, this was that rare case.

Answer 2

I don't know what happened there. I had seen the ~10 flags but had other things happening, and didn't have time to read into them all in detail.

At first thought I wondered it the flags had "timed out" somehow, but some digging on that is inconclusive.

When are moderator flags automatically dismissed as "aged away" by the system? doesn't specifically mention the "no longer needed" flag.

You're right how some of those comments are tangential, some are short answers, some are probably intended to be funny, and many are not "improvements or clarifications" which is the intention of a comment.

So in summary - I'm not sure what happened there. I've also asked in the mod support channel.

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I have now cleaned up the comments that were not about clarifications or improvements.

As a mod I can simply shovel all the comments off into a chatroom, but realistically that's where they go to die. Almost noone continues those discussions. And is only really a good fit if the comments were all inter-related replies. I generally avoid doing the "move to chat"