I often wish they had implemented a ‘tangent’ mechanism that would have allowed folks to have an interesting conversation in a bit of an off topic manner about the question. It could be represented by an a link and not interfer with the main answer.
Stack Exchange moderators needing to constantly delete comment threads with "use chat" has to be one of the biggest case of desire lines online I've seen.
Absolutely this. And also whenever I see a mod axe a whole conversation and replace it with the form response of "this conversation has been moved to chat", I know that is Stack Exchange's way of tossing conversation into /dev/null (and oftentimes when I'm involved in one of those conversations, it gets the axe because the mod doesn't want opposition to their opinion). It's deleting content without actually deleting content. I've seen way too many useful, on-topic, mind-expanding conversations tossed out using this mechanism, never to be seen again.
