I posted this Why does Neelix cook, when the replicator can produce any meal? which last time I looked had 3 or 4 comments on the question. This morning, the comments have gone. If they have been moved to chat, then that's fine but I'd expect a 'comments moved to chat' and a link to the chat. This is what normally happens on other Stack sites I visit.
If the comments have just been straight up deleted, then what's the reasoning behind that?
I haven't deleted them, but I can understand why they were. The first one was probably the most useful among them, but ultimately also more an attempt at a quick one-stentence answer than anything else. The other two qere really just entirely useless riffing on Neelix, Jar Jar and whomever else. Noone really needs that. They were also flagged for removal by other users (likely for exactly those reasons).
Why not move them to chat? For the same reason they were deleted, they were largely useless and there was no reason for the comments to stick around. Moving to chat makes sense when there's some kind of long-winded and distracting, but not entirely useless side discussion going on, that might also still be in progress. But really a chatroom (that's deleted after a week too) full of "Neelix is as dumb as Jar Jar" and "Hihi, much fun that" is really not of use to anyone involved.
Comments are largely ephemeral on SE sites (yes, other Stack sites, too), especially when they don't add anything to the question or the topic at large and are just funny remarks. And even more so on a Hot Network Question it's probably best to inhibit idle chatter rather sooner than later.
