Ask a follow-up question

This is confusing. If it's a question then it should be posted on the main site not in discussions. If you want to direct users to post in discussions then it shouldn't say "question". It should be clear that you are starting a discussion topic instead.

This probably shouldn't be something that just always pops up.

The current design seems built around educating the user what interactions they should be taking based on their intent; ask a followup sends them somewhere else, thank you casts an upvote. Shouldn't there be a point where a user is "educated" enough such that we trust that they meant to click add comment instead of create a discussion or cast an upvote?

Would you get a pop-up prompt every time you are adding a comment?

While the vast majority of comment threads are not useful, it's also true that most of the time when asking for additional data you need more than one comment to get results.

E.g.

Please, add the what specific version of Module Foo you are using; and on what platform you are building the app. _{^{Interested User - 12:32}}

I'm using Carrot OS XP for Groups. I'm using the default Module. How do I find out what version is it? _{^{Original Poster - 12:35}}

Run module-ls -l -i -a -ntt to find out exact version of Module Foo, and add that info to the question, please _{^{Interested User - 12:41}}

Will each of this require going through a "choose your comment" popup?

It takes three clicks to even start writing a comment now:

1. Click "Add a comment".
2. Click "Comment with a clarification".
3. Take your hand off the mouse and start typing.
4. Realise you are not writing anything. Because the comment box is not focused.
5. Stop composing the comment in your head, lift your hand from the keyboard, grab the mouse.
6. Click in the comment box.
7. Try to remember why you should even bother with all of this.

I did it 3-4 times today and it has put me off commenting. I am not going to comment on the main site again at least until tomorrow. I will reassess whether I would be posting comments.

Speaking as a Discussion mod, I really wish that Discussions would be a bit more mature before there's noticeably more traffic. We're still in the stage where:

• There's no real community moderation (other than spam). For example, no community editing or deleting.
• Much less are there mod tools. For example, no locks (which works in tandem with community editing on the main site)
• I'm still asking "are we flagging/deleting Discussions we all agree should go?" and the answer of course is "no clue cuz there's no way to audit anything". Moderation doesn't happen transparently, not even when you have all the privileges.
• Even for the rules that we have hammered out, there doesn't seem to be enough guidance for new users. I'm not sure there's any guidance for replies, but that's also where the rules are the least established.

Can you press the thank-you button multiple times? If yes, what happens if someone does it? Will it send multiple notifications? Will it undo the upvote? Is there any visual feedback to the user that they have pressed the button in the past, i.e. when they come back to this question months later already forgotten what they've learned?

This is a great start, so thank you for putting in the time to address comments! If something like this always existed, it would've saved me over 25,000 flags since joining the site.

That being said, I think there are better ways forward for both of the primary reasons:

1. Saying thank you

   I really don't want to get a bunch of inbox notifications for thank yous if there isn't reputation associated with them. Instead, I think you should either:

   • don't notify the post owner, and simply show the thank you count on the post, instead (visible only to the post owner and moderators)
   • at least give users the option of turning off thank you notifications from their inbox.

2. Asking a follow-up question

   I think it's a mistake to assume someone wants to start an open-ended or opinion-based discussion about this by default. While I really like that you're directly pointing the user to another location when they try to do something (more of that elsewhere, like when they try to ask questions that belong on another site, please!!!), but a large portion of the time, people want to ask a follow-up question about the code that was provided, in a way that is an on-topic, acceptable question. I can't keep count of the number of times I have seen questions on Stack Overflow that start off with or mention the phrase "I came across this question/answer, but had X question about it..." Thus, I propose the following refinement(s):

   • If someone clicks 'add a comment' on the question, this option should just point them to Discussions (probably shouldn't be phrased 'ask a follow-up question' though... I suggest just 'Start a Discussion about this Question')

   • However, if someone clicks 'add a comment' on someone else's answer, this option should be split out to:

     • 'Ask a follow-up Question about this Answer', which should take them to the "Ask a Question" page, or:
     • the already mentioned 'Start a Discussion about this Answer' which would take them to Discussions.

the comments text box is clear about what a comment should be for.

Clear indeed, or almost: With its current contrast level against the background, it might as well have an opacity of zero. Does it even pass your accessibility standards? I can't believe you're implementing a whole new feature (with more frustrating UX) as if the current thing (the placeholder text) is insufficient when I feel like you haven't put in the small amount of effort to give it a better fighting chance.

On follow-up discussions

• Why do follow-up questions go to discussions? I thought we established that things that should be question posts should be question posts, and shouldn't go in discussions.

  • How to prevent question asking in Collective discussions
  • What should the Discussions flag reason “should be a question” be changed to?, which resulted in a flag reason covering discussions that should be Q&A.

• What will UI/UX for people blocked from posting in discussions be like?

• Will there be any kind of privilege gate for making follow up things? I'm anticipating people using it to attempt to write any kind of comment (including the useless kind especially) when they don't have comment privileges.

  My understanding is that when we launch this experiment, the rep requirement will be moved back to 1

  ... oh. Well, I'll have my popcorn ready.

• For the thing that goes in the comment space linking to the related discussion, does it go away if that discussion removes its link to the Q&A or gets deleted?

• During the experiment, when users click the ‘Add a Comment’ button on Q&A they are not the author of, they will see the following options: Comment with a clarification: What comments are currently intended for

  That's like- the opposite of what comments on questions posts are for. Clarifications of question posts should be edits to the question post. Our platform has a thing for being constrained about what comments are appropriate, but I never thought I'd be telling you your UI text is over-constrained past actual guidance.

On "Thanks"

• Is there really significant value to having this "thanks" thing if it automatically adds an upvote for those who can upvote? To me, it looks essentially as if you made anonymous upvotes notify the post owner.

  • I can get on board with making information about anonymous votes more visible to respective post owners (on that note, I'd strongly suggest notifications about anonymous votes be opt-in or aggregated per some configurable time interval and sent out only after the interval has passed. Just imagine Jon Skeet's inbox).

• I don't see value in being able to thank someone but not upvote. If something was somehow useful, but still worthy of a downvote for some other standard-guidance reason, that sounds like a good scenario to leave a comment or perform some other existing action (Ex. improve the presentation of information by editing). Am I missing something? Or if there's really no value in sending a "thanks" without upvoting... what's the point? Even the Help Center page on voting affirms that upvoting is a good way to thank the post author. Why not just increase the value of anonymous votes to the user? I've made multiple suggestions at various times about how to do that.

• Re "measuring comment deletions going down"

  • they likely will not- at least not significantly, and not for several months. Of the 6-7k "thank you" comment deletions per month, ~2.7k of those are mine, and I'll guess that roughly the same amount are coming from Floern.
  • Why don't you measure more directly, like the percentage over time intervals of incoming comments which contain "thank" and related patterns ("thx", "tks", etc.)?

• Can anonymous users send "thank you"s? If they can, how will you keep track of whether that individual has already sent their thank you?

• Assuming "thank you"s result in notifications, do they go with the rep and badge notifications? Or the normal inbox? Do multiple "thank you"s in a single day on the same post get coalesced?

• Assuming these are implemented as votes, will these votes be made available in SEDE?

Personal user feedback

I really don't like how you've increased the number of clicks / key-presses I need to take to add a comment by 200%.

Comment with a clarification

I suppose this should read "request clarification", or similar? Usually it's the author, not the commenter who is supposed to clarify things, and as noted in the comments (ironically) of the main post, clarifications are supposed to be edited into the question body.

This is pretty annoying to me. I am part of this experiment now and when I want to post a comment, I have to click twice. I don't really appreciate that given that I never say thanks in comments. I think you need to find a better way to do this.

This is a poorly considered feature. Just rollback it and re-consider what you were even thinking.

Saying "thanks this helped me" is explicitly not what comments are for, but up-votes and accepting an answer. Teaching beginners otherwise is counter-productive as it will lead to more comment clutter over time.

Saying "thanks this helped me" to a question is plain strange. The question is not an answer to that same question, obviously. Sure it could help you if you arrive late to the party and have the same question as the OP. But more likely you think the question was well-phrased or interesting and wish to thank the poster somehow because of that.

"Comment with a clarification" is incorrectly phrased. Should it not be "comment suggesting clarification"? Only the OP of a post will ever leave a "comment with a clarification".

"Comment with a clarification" is not the only reason why someone would leave a comment. How about replying to another person who pinged you with @user? Or if someone would like to drop a helpful link rather than posting a link-only answer? Or leave a helpful comment which isn't substantial enough to be posted as an answer. Etc etc.

Please disable this for users with more than, say, 450 rep.

we are not bringing the emojis back

Yet, you're bringing back a fundamentally irrelevant feature that was criticized in principle: the emoji itself was not the problem, unnecessarily complicating the interaction was.

Users with <50 rep cannot comment. Users with <15 rep cannot vote.

This means that if you really want to add such (pointless to many) "thank you" notification, it would only make sense to users with less than 15 or, at the very least, less than 50.

If they've reached 50, they probably already know a bit more on how the website works^[1], then you could eventually filter the possibility of allowing the "thank you" based on their interaction (obviously, 5 upvotes on one question wouldn't apply). By the time they've reached 250-500, they most certainly know that the more appropriate way to "thank" is to upvote.

Showing such a prompt to users with +1000k is completely pointless, not to mention annoying and inappropriate: if I click on "Add a comment" I expect I can add a comment, not being asked what to do, including something completely different. That's UX 101 (and it's ironic that SE also has an UX dedicated website, which would've highly criticised such a choice to begin with).

You probably don't want to add too many options, to avoid an overcrowded UI, but if that results in annoying the user by having to click more than necessary to do something they clearly knew they wanted to do, that's a terrible UI choice anyway.

Also, as already pointed out, this addition completely broke keyboard shortcuts. Maybe in 2025 not many people uses keyboard shortcuts as they did 10-15 years ago, but since this is also a developer website, I'm pretty sure many of them still do. And when you're used to keyboard shortcuts, being forced to move the mouse because of a poorly designed feature is extremely annoying.

So:

• As already (and reasonably) criticized, the "thank you" feature is pointless, and should not be added again; please, seriously, stop it;
• If the attempt is to avoid removing "thank you" comments, then improve the algorithm that prevents users to do them; you already have something similar that usually works fine for comments in answers, as those comments are immediately removed as soon as they're flagged; providing an "alternate" method to demonstrate appreciation is pointless: most of us will survive without knowing how <15 rep users would thank us without upvoting instead;
• add a different link to go to the discussion;
• eventually add a setting to disable the popup for those not interested in discussions and/or "thank you" options;
• fix the shortcuts (and also fix the scrolling while you're at that);
• take more time considering how a feature actually improves the system and the experience to all users; and without breaking things or needlessly complicating the interaction;

PS: The post still says that this will be monitored only until January 29th, which is quite odd, since most of us didn't actually see its behavior until now (I only saw the new popup a few hours ago). I sincerely hope you'll keep monitoring this in the next weeks, as this update certainly isn't satisfactory at this point.

One reason comments work so much worse on SE than everywhere else on the Internet is because this is the last site on the Internet not supporting threaded comments. Which quickly results in a wall of random discussions all mixed together in one big goo. This is a UI design problem.

A lot of on-topic comments below posts do add significant value to the post and needn't be deleted/migrated to chat, if there was a way to follow them easier. I would think a typical scenario for comment deletion/migration is this:

• A lot of diverse aspects of the posts are commented on, in chronological order, rather than sorted underneath one particular issue.
• When a diamond mod arrives to the post, they face a wall of incoherent text. Some 3-4 different issues being discussed in comments intermixed with each other. Plenty who need deletion because they are chatty, off-topic etc. But also good ones.
• The mod choses to throw the baby out with the bathwater and delete/migrate the whole thing.

Particularly troublesome on meta where we are explicitly supposed to actually discuss things - "comments below this post tagged discussion aren't for discussion". Of course they are, discussions are great. What is not so great is 20+ people holding their own artificial monologue in form of a written answer. The Q&A format is quite horrible for meta discussions. Threaded comments would be one way to salvage the situation quite a bit. Lets have people actually interacting during discussions, brainstorming and exchanging ideas.

Comments are a common feature on the Internet. Most, if not all, people understand the point of comments and how to use them… Except on the Stack Exchange network, where comments are meant to be ephemeral and primarily for the purpose of improving Q&A.

Most of the problems with "comments" is the labeling. As with tags, nobody reads the nice text, so you need to change the name so that it is patently obvious that it is not a "comment". There was a change way back to change Area 51 "comments" label to "suggest improvements":

Unfortunately I also flag dozens-to-hundreds of posts daily simply to remove misplaced answers and other minutia from comments which simply don't belong there. [...] Only recently, I changed the comment prompt in Area 51 from "add comment" to "suggest improvements" (the primary use case for example questions), and that number dropped to essentially… ZERO!

The problem with comments is the labeling. Change the labeling and you will probably see a improvement, which would be cheaper and more impactful.

Feedback #1

Why do I get these 2 options when placing a comment on a question without answers?

There is nobody to say thanks to. The question itself had already -2 votes and was about to be closed, saying thanks doesn't seem fit here.

Users who have less than 15 rep and attempt to vote will be shown the thank you prompt.

Why wouldn't that include a separate button, so we don't need an extra click to leave a comment (as the button indicates).

As an active user who leave a lot of comments referring to our [tour], how-to-ask and code as images, having an additional click doesn't seem like a big issue, but will probably be the last straw.

Feedback #2

Will an option to retract my 'thank you' be implemented?

Feedback #3

The 'Keyboard shortcuts' has the C button act to 'add/show comments'.

But with these awesome changes, it's no longer possible to comment using only the keyboard.

Please add support for these options to the keyboard shortcuts.

I wonder if adding an extra step when clicking the "Add comment" button is the best approach. Perhaps adding two more links at the same level:

Add a comment | Ask a followup question | Say thanks

might be a better approach. Each is only a one click action and it's immediately obvious what we're expecting people to do. You could remove the "Say thanks" option for higher reputation users who, presumably, know what they're supposed to do.

On a similar note we could do with a "Have you solved this?" link on questions next to the "Answer this question" link which will send a private message to the OP rather than having the question posted as an answer.

Others have already pointed out the issues with moving "follow up questions" to Discussions. Besides all of that, if you still decide (have decided) to move forward with this, you should add some functionalities to Discussions so it can accommodate the influx of posts without catching on fire. Please give us a minimum viable product, before further experimenting with it.

Most importantly, give us SEARCH! If everything is going to be dumped on top, we'll end up with a pile, virtually impossible to be moderated, and eventually filled with garbage. We have just got Discussions somewhat cleaned-up (I personally invested a lot of time deleting low quality posts, replies, etc. and I know other Discussions mods did so too).

We should at least be able to differentiate between follow up discussions and other Discussions posts.

The last try at the "Thank you" feature in 2020 ended with more than a score below -1000. I wish there would have been more discussion of the major points from then here in this announcement. They were (just reading through the old answers):

• redundant (there is already voting and people who can comment can also vote)
• confusing (is it a vote or not)
• distracting and adding complexity (UI clutter, possibly additional clicks needed)
• waste of time (why saying thank you, when voting is already saying thank you)
• people might skip voting (say a thank-you but no upvote, how useful is that)
• focus on people, not on content
• not saying thanks might be perceived as impolite (social pressure)
• not effective (people might still prefer to say thanks in their own words because that's more authentic)
• wrong message (we edit thanks out of content typically)
• no purpose (what does a thank you actually say about the content, for what is the person actually thankful)
• incongruent usage (downvotes + thanks for example)
• no opt out (at the time of the last experiment)
• meaningless (no impact on reputation)
• slippery slope (sliding towards a social network)
• solution without a problem (detecting and deleting these comments is simple, even more so in 2025 than in 2020)
• not an interesting metric (what does it mean to have received X thank-yous)

There were even lots of suggestions, for example "detect when users write "thanks" in comments and instruct on how to upvote." but they were never implemented, or were they?

I may not agree with them all, but they make a pretty strong, compelling case against a thank-you feature. Maybe we need to wait for the experiment to finish (hopefully it will) and then see it in the results.

bugstatus-completed

It is now impossible to add a comment from the review queues (outside of the Share Feedback button) due to this experiment.

UPDATE: This doesn't seem to occur on Triage but seems occurs on all the other queues I have access to

UPDATE 2: First Questions has also started working, FA and LA still don't

UPDATE 3: Now fixed.

We will monitor this post for feedback until January 29th, 2025.

Is this accurate? The experiment just started today ...

In general, would it be too much to ask to add settings to disable features like this? I know it's an experiment and all, but experienced users should know how to click the Vote button to "Thank" a user rather than have to endure 2 extra clicks.

When you click "Say thanks"(Ugh.. extra click to comment? And that's the second option?), The following message pops up:

Thank you for your appreciation! We will share your thanks with the author.

Other than being completely annoying, I just want to know Is this a lie? Do you actually share my "thanks" with the author? Or am I being blatantly lied to?

I really dislike this new feature; please consider either a redesign or a complete roll-back.

Forcing me to navigate a menu, however small, of choices every time I want to leave a comment leads to a very awkward user experience. I will probably never choose to send a private thank you to another poster; making me choose a comment type just gets in my way. I'm not really interested in getting thank you notes from any other users, either.

It is possible that a redesign which presents this menu only to low-rep users might be a satisfactory compromise, but in its current form I find this feature to be extremely frustrating and cumbersome.

I think the "Ask a follow-up question" option is quite confusing. Take, for example, this situation:

• someone asks a clarification question in a comment (e.g. "what OS are you using?")
• the question poster answers
• now someone wants to ask another clarification question

In this case, I'd personally "ask a follow-up question" instead of just posting a comment. Probably "Start a discussion about this question/answer" would be better.

Please restore support for standard browser keyboard navigation techniques for adding comments

This feature just went live on Stack Overflow, and is already causing me some considerable pain there (via wrist tendonitis).

Firefox natively supports Find As You Type:

Find As You Type (formerly called Type Ahead Find) is a feature that allows quick web page navigation when you type a succession of characters in the body of the displayed page (not in an edit box of or drop down list).

Chrome (which I don't use) supports it as an extension.

Previous to this change, I could use "Find As You Type" and type "add a comment" to navigate to the commenting feature, then hit carriage return, and type a comment. Now this is broken, since "Add a comment" is no longer a link.

As a workaround, I have noticed that I can do "Ctrl-F", then type "add a comment", then when the correct commenting label is found, type a carriage return, then type Shift+Tab to navigate backwards, then type a second carriage return, which will launch the "Comment with a clarification / Say thanks" popup -- but I cannot tab forward to the correct link because "Comment with a clarification" was not inserted into the tab index immediately after "Add a comment". So now I have to search again.

Those of use who need to use keyboard navigation (because e.g. for health or accessibility reasons we have trouble moving our hands back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse) need them to work in standard ways. So please restore standard browser keyboard navigation to commenting.

(And, honestly, as a 100,000K user, why would I ever say thanks? If I want to thank someone I'll just upvote their post. And as a frequent reviewer, the massive increase in difficulty in commenting makes it much more likely I'll abandon reviewing entirely and e.g. not comment on the steady stream of plagiarized posts we get every day. So this change is pure pain for me.)

In particular, we would be interested in hearing feedback on any of the following items:

Copy (i.e. the wording of text in dialog boxes and the like)

Passive voice when a discussion starts feels unnecessary. Instead:

A followup discussion started

or even better, show the time just like the other entries:

A followup discussion started 3 hours ago

There could be years between comments and discussion starting, so time seems relevant.

I like this experiment quite a bit! Always good to see onboarding work around here.

we don’t believe this is an onboarding issue: the comments text box is clear about what a comment should be for.

I don't think that's quite right. Having a text box doesn't mean you're done with onboarding. We still get all sorts of bad comments, non-answer answers, screenshots of code, and so on, even though there's text in boxes or the Ask Wizard that specifically advise against that.

That being said, yall seem to know that intuitively? This is essentially an onboarding change - the goal is to teach new users how and how not to use comments constructively.

Asking a follow-up question (Discussions have entered the discussion)

I don't think Discussions is the best place for all of these questions. Some of them, sure. But a lot of the time, follow-up questions are actual on-topic questions. I don't hate the idea of integrating Discussions with Q&A, but I think there needs to be more nuance here. Perhaps a menu to choose whether the question should go to Q&A or discussions, with some links or tips to guide your decision, would be a better way to handle this.

When a reader uses the “thank you” option, a thank you notification will go to the author. If the user doing the thanking has upvoting privileges, then this will also upvote the post. This upvote can be undone just like any other vote. If a user has the upvoting privilege, the first banner will be shown. If the user does not, they will see the second banner.

This is great! I'm not sure it needs to be available to people with the upvote privilege, though. To me, a "thanks" button is basically a harmless version of an upvote for users we don't quite trust yet. For users we do trust, upvotes are enough; they imply gratitude already.

That being said, this seems like a good place for the long-requested end-of-post upvote button - I wouldn't mind if the copy switched to "upvote" at 15 rep.

Copy

"Comment with a clarification" isn't great. There are a lot of uses for comments that aren't clarification. Since the other options explain what they should be used for, I think just "comment" is fine.

"Say thanks, this helps me" is grammatically funky. I'd prefer there to be quotes somewhere in there: Say "thanks, this helps me"

I don't love that the "thanks" button uses the reputation icon. It mixes meanings and suggests that saying thanks gives rep. Maybe a thumbs-up would be better?

Feature flows

Can these be separate buttons instead of a dialog? Neither a follow-up question nor "thanks" should be a comment, so it doesn't make sense for those things to be in a comments menu. Separating the buttons would also reduce friction; experienced users wouldn't have to deal with the dialog every time they want to add a comment anymore.

I know there are a lot of critiques here, but that's because I like the experiment, not because I hate it. If I hated it, I'd ask yall to shut it down - I'm only offering my opinion because I actually want it to succeed.

What we will measure...comment deletions going down

Will you measure all comment deletion or just comments deleted as No Longer Needed? If you aren't already, please only measure No Longer Needed comments because Unfriendly/Unkind and Harrassment/Bigotry/Abuse comments are almost certainly not users trying to have any sort of subjective conversation/thanking a user/off-topic or related questions.

Also, please only measure if those comments were made since this experiment started. This experiment will obviously not affect the existence of a thanks comment from 15 years ago.

bug

Adding a comment is completely broken if the post was reloaded in-page. Clicking "Add a comment" does nothing.

The clickable areas of the buttons in the popup should be improved to match the container it sits within that gets highlighted on hover. Currently the clickable area is just the text and the icon, with no space around it.