I would like to have a discussion about the practice of "moving comments to chat".
I understand that it is a useful tool which can be used to promote the "purity" of the SE Q&A format, however as this function is currently implemented, it effectively kills all discussion about the Answer and, in many cases, removes valuable contextualization or critique of the answer. The difference between simply deleting all the comments and moving them to chat is minute.
Here are my primary reasons I think the practice should be used only in absolutely extreme outlier cases:
Comments are important
Comments, like posts, have the ability to be voted on. It occasionally happens that a comment receives more upvotes than the post itself, which usually indicates that there is severe need for revision of the answer (or some aspect of it). This is vitally important, and should be immediately visible on the same page as the Answer post. Banishing comments to chat not only removes all valuation of those comments (there are no upvotes in chat that I can see) and it makes them a click away, which is basically gone.
There's no appeal process
Many of the actions on SE are tied to user reputation, including features like editing other people's posts or other "moderator"-esque actions--this is a very unique and "strange" feature that I quite like about SE. Despite this, the ability to move comments to chat seems to be a function reserved for moderators with no appeal or voting process, as closing a post would be. As far as I can tell, there's no way for regular high-reputation users to, for example, bring back a highly-upvoted comment so that it sits underneath the post, short of editing the post to include the comment (which I think we can all agree upon is a bad idea).
Comments are fun
This is maybe a bit of "realpolitik", but fun, stimulating, and occasionally adversarial exchanges in the comments are one of the primary reasons I engage with the site. I suspect others feel the same (?) and banishing comment discussions to chat makes me less likely to engage with the site and ask/answer questions. I feel that, if the price for raising engagement, reach, and quality of answers is a tiny bit of "chaos" in the comments, that's a sacrifice that we should be willing to make.
Obviously, there is a personal connection, because this post was motivated by is a recent usage of this tool in this answer by moderator @Rory Alsop where my comment was "deleted". As I remember--because I can't look it up anymore as there are no comment vote values visible in the chat--one of my comments had like four upvotes, which, in comparison to a post which itself has about 10 upvotes, would indicate to me that the general active userbase either agreed with my point or thought it was a valuable contribution or "post-it note" to the Answer, in alignment with the rules outlining comments (explained here).
While I'd prefer if this tool were never or nearly never used, I can see a compromise solution where perhaps only comments that have zero upvotes are banished to the chat-realm.
Thoughts, feelings, opinions?
