Collapsed comments are a silly feature. 99% of the time it’s used to indicate political disagreement, not a thoughtless comment.

It's pretty rare, even in politics, for a reasonable, respectful, and constructive comment to be downvoted enough to be hidden. If your comments are frequently hidden, you may want to reconsider your tact in replying to people.

Not all comments that ought to be hidden are violations of our terms of service. Some comments are just rude, uninformed, or off topic, but not really violations. Hidden comments are also a way for full-on violations to be hidden more frequently since mods cannot instantly moderate every comment.

Tact has little to do with it, in my experience. Right-leaning comments in politics often get more upvotes the *less* tactful they are.

E.g. Check out this minefield imgflip.com/i/4fkujg

Admittedly, that thread got a little testy (on “both sides”!), but this one is a little more representative of what I am talking about

imgflip.com/i/4fh6mr

Another example imgflip.com/i/4fi4ee

This collapsed comment thread concludes with a comment of questionable tact from a certain Community Mod imgflip.com/i/4fkfnh

More

imgflip.com/i/4filmz

Sure you could fault me for my “tone,” but any criticisms you might have of my tone go x10 for the right-leaning commenters here

Hmm, was one of your comments downvoted and got collapsed in the process?
Just wondering......

Try roughly 50% of the comments I make in the “politics” stream lol

I can't judge what I didn't read, but this was just way too obvious...

Hit the comment-downvote button if it sparks joy I guess, but I’d like to see the “collapsed comment” feature removed from ImgFlip entirely.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had paragraphs’ worth of thoughtful commentary buried because people didn’t like what I said. Typically on the “politics” stream. I doubt this is what the feature was intended for (seems to be more intended for thoughtless “ur mom gay”-style insults), and yet that seems to be how it’s often used in practice.

If someone replies — and they typically do, because the comment chain brings up interesting points — it’s a chore to have to try to find where they replied in order to reply again because when a comment is collapsed, clicking the notif doesn’t take you directly there.

Tl;dr — Comments that break TOS should be flagged and removed, but collapsing someone else’s comment simply because you disagree is a lame move.

This is being discussed currently, I don't like it either, as the most flagged comments are in the politics stream and to see them I have to sift through dozens of other comments. At the very least your notifications and flagged comments should go directly to a meme comment regardless of whether it is in a "click to show" thread or not. Hopefully some improvements are in the works.

Wonderful