Revisiting our policies on thank-you comments

Question

Despite the little notice in the comments section telling us that comments along the lines of 'thank you' aren't welcome because they don't move the discussion forward mathematically, I have always made a point of trying to thank other users when they elucidate something for me or otherwise help me out.

Recently, I had a 'thank you' comment on an answer to a question of mine get deleted; I have an educated guess as to who deleted it and why, and no real qualms with the deletion in this instance, but it made me realize that the moderation staff might be taking a harder line stance regarding professionalism. This is understandable, but I am curious what the community here feels should be prioritized: professionalism or decorum?

These things aren't diametrically opposed to one-another; any successful professional environment will naturally have some version of 'politeness' built into its structure and decorous environments naturally engender professional pursuits (to some extent), but they aren't synonymous either.

I personally try to err on the side of decorum in any environment, but this could just be me being weird. What are some other community opinions?

Answer 1

I must say that I think having a small amount of "personality" adds value to a community. Giving and receiving acknowledgement is one of the most benign additions to conversation, and it's clearly separated from the more professional Q&A aspect of the site.

More generally, comments provide a social outlet for the less professional interactions. In a positive context, this is used to ask/receive clarifications. But even this provides a "social" interaction between two people, and positive/helpful such interactions encourage people to return. Even seeing secondhand a clarification-and-answer in comments or a "thanks" gives the appearance of a somewhat "warm" community.

Professionalism and formal conduct has its place, especially when trying to resolve knowledge questions, but I would caution that being overly strict or overly formal has detrimental effects to building a community. I have been involved with extremely formal online communities in the past, and the "drier" the community, the more likely I am to self-censor, and find myself engaging with the community (as a community, a collection of people) less and less over the years.

MO seems to get the balance right with some occasional off-topic comments allowed (thanks/acknowledgement), while still generally maintaining professionalism (e.g., comments rarely devolve into chat conversations).

Just because comments are ephemeral, here is a related example of what I think MO does right. It is my favorite comment chain on MO (about Heisenbert and Heisenernie), and I hope it remains forever. It was a serious answer with a simple typo that is unlikely to be confused with anyone, and it spawned a couple of silly comments that have remained for 10+ years now. It makes me think that all these serious math folks are maybe not so scary; they can sometimes laugh at their own mistakes (a typo), and perhaps the serious math moderators are not so overbearing.

This is not quite the same as the original question, but I think it's relevant. Allowing slightly off-topic and/or occasional off-topic comments such as thanks/acknowledgement add value to a community and should be allowed.

Answer 2

Back when I was more active moderating, I had noticed that there was one particular user who had not contributed much mathematically, but had flagged an incredible number of comments for deletion - well into the thousands. Most of them were relatively innocuous, like "thank you"s and such, but some were good fits for "no longer needed". I mostly rejected the unnecessary flags, but some other moderators may not have done so. The rate of flagging was never too bothersome, so I never bothered to make contact to ask why.