I agree with this -- sometimes the comments are more interesting and informative than the answer. And why is it ordained that "Comments aren't for extended discussion"?

Only a handful of upvoted comments are shown by default, you have to deliberately expand the list to see more, so why not retain them all? If someone wants to wade through 200 commments and add one of his own, what's the real harm? They could add an option for askers/answerers to "Stop notifications for new comments', if that's the issue.

>discussion

Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion.

What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.

No, please don't push things out to a forum - few would use a forum and it doubles the pages a searcher has to check to see if they've got the appropriate question/answer.

A lot of the time if there's many comments on a question or answer it's because there's some nuance that needs to be brought out or the answer has limitations etc. Someone arriving from search probably needs and wants to know that - and will take but a moment to decide if the comments look worthwhile enough to expand and read more.

SO displays it well enough technically by only picking out the top 4 or 5 comments. What SO needs is the mods leaving the comments well alone unless they're abusive or spam.

Stack Overflow has had problems with too many comments. In https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... there is a question about how much comments cost in terms of signal to noise. Do comments make finding good answers further down on the page harder to find? Do they make good answers get less votes?

Note that in that post, everyone who has a diamond after their name is a StackOverflow employee.

One of the reasons SO was created was because programming forums didn't work well enough for Q&A. And I think SO did succeed at doing that.

I don't think tacking on a forum is the right way to make it even better.

> What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.

That's kind of what Meta is.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com

Mm in my view they don't need a forum, they just need to get out of the way of the community. The tools are all there; they've designed them well. It's just their imposition of arbitrary unhelpful rules that's the problem.