Given past questions for holidays:
I wanted to ask the workplace community what are some topics of discussion that has taken place this past year that merits a year-end review?
What are some topics you would like to bring up?
Irresponsible comments influencing voters on answers: You write an answer covering multiple aspects of the issue in reasonable detail. Minutes later, someone writes a comment, "Downvoting because you start by suggesting X, but it that would lead to issue Y."
Now, you were aware of the issue Y when you wrote the answer, and had elaborated how to deal with that a couple of sentences later, so what went wrong here? The problem is that either some people have the attention span of a goldfish and hence cannot read more than 2 sentences, or that they have an irresistible urge to criticize and hence cannot have the patience to read the complete answer before commenting.
Then other users read the comment, and downvote the answer because, (duh!) the answer must be definitely wrong because a comment says so, and anyway, who has the time to read the answer and use their own brains to figure out if the criticism is valid or not?
This is made even worse by StackExchange's strange system of "hiding" comments based on upvotes, so even if you post your own comment explaining why that criticism is unjustified, it would most likely be hidden, and again, who wants to bother reading all the comments, when it is just easier to downvote by reading the top voted comment?
Unfortunately, the comment flagging mechanism isn't much helpful here either. To begin with, while the criticism may be invalid, it isn't actually rude, offensive, "chatty", etc. so flagging it will most likely not lead to its deletion. Moreover, comment deletion can be done only by a moderator, which means usually the damage has already been done by the time they get to it.
So, what can we do about it?
On the whole, nothing much. At a personal level though, we could resist the urge to comment the moment we see something we don't agree with, and actually have the patience to read and understand the complete answer.
We could also avoid passing judgements (especially, the use of "downvoting/-1 because ...") in the comments, and instead phrase our criticism as a question: "How does your solution X deal with issue Y?" Criticism phrased this way is much more constructive. Moreover, this also allows the commenter to save face, as against, "ha ha, your solution missed issue Y, look I am so clever."
Also, if we do not have the patience to read the complete answer, we have the option to ... not comment at all (shocking fact, I know!).
As an aside, this nuisance was one of the main factors that led me to retire in restricted mode from this site.
Our tags are kind of a mess. This answer suggests paying more attention to wikis and synonyms, which I agree with, but it feels to me like we don't have the right set of tags. Too often I can tell that the tags on a question aren't quite right but I can't find better ones. Sure I could just create some, but I'm always left wondering what our scheme even is and if I should be adding more clutter. We can talk about individual tags, which I've brought up sometimes, but it feels like the whole set could use a critical review before we start moving things around.
But that's hard, and where I always run out of steam.
One of the things that gets me is Voting to close as too broad when there are already 2-3 perfectly good answers from people who did not find the question too broad. This is all part of TLDR and Twitter mentality that is so pervasive and destructive to our site and our society in general. Complex issues need complex responses, but that doesn't make them too broad to answer.
To condensate my comment into an answer:
More edits and less VTC. Instead of plain VTC or following a Vote trend I believe we should try to edit the post to make it clearer and more on-topic, by asking the OP for clarification and using our common knowledge.
Several posts that contain some minor mistake or have a really small degree of off-topicness are quickly closed, when most of them could actually be edited out to be a good question.
I feel that we sometimes are quick to close when we see the minor indication of off-topicness, like when seeing a question that begins with "Should I" and VTC without even trying to remove the "should I" part. This is the part we could work on, and at least try to edit or obtain clarification before deciding to vote.
Give some love to our tags. I feel some tag Wikis and excerpts are poor on description, and several others don't even have one. I also feel we have forgotten to accept and propose tag synonyms, which would help us have fewer, more significant tags.
