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I've had a comment to this recent question removed without, well, comment and I'm curious why. The deleted comment was: "(Incidentally, I disagree with the downvote and have upvoted to compensate. Being a duplicate is not the same as being a bad question.)" Is this comment in violation of some policy I'm unaware of?

(This actually happened multiple times, since at first I wasn't sure my comment had in fact gone through.)

Here's a screenshot of the comment thread pre-comment-deletion:

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Because comments are meant to clarify the question. Things like "I don't know why this was downvoted [or upvoted]" or "+1! I've upvoted" or "Thank you!" are considered noise, and are generally deleted. $\endgroup$
    – Xander Henderson Mod
    Commented Mar 9, 2022 at 16:47
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    $\begingroup$ Btw, regarding such so-called "pity upvotes", see this prior meta thread for why some users consider them bad for the site. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 9, 2022 at 17:10
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    $\begingroup$ Clearly the comment was too big to fit in the margin. $\endgroup$
    – copper.hat
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 7:00

1 Answer 1

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Turning Xander Henderson's comment into an answer so it can be voted on:

Because comments are meant to clarify the question. Things like "I don't know why this was downvoted [or upvoted]" or "+1! I've upvoted" or "Thank you!" are considered noise, and are generally deleted.

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  • $\begingroup$ Xander's Comment can be voted up, but not down of course. Comments on the main site are often described as "ephemeral content" and may be removed once their relevance has waned. $\endgroup$
    – hardmath
    Commented Mar 10, 2022 at 17:52
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    $\begingroup$ There are -7 to 7 votes on the answer, so there is some disagreement on the it. $\endgroup$
    – Тyma Gaidash
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 3:36
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    $\begingroup$ @TymaGaidash, now -11 to +11. It is clear that the community is in a state of perfect equanimity. 😄 $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 22:21
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    $\begingroup$ Long time since I laughed so hard at a comment @Lspice $\endgroup$
    – Brian
    Commented Mar 12, 2022 at 14:44
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    $\begingroup$ The pop-up tag for the up(down)vote arrow says "This answer is (not) useful". I deem it to be useful. While I agree that users should be encouraged to upvote rather than make routine positive comments like those cited in the answer, I'm not sure that the noise-reduction benefit of arbitrarily deleting such comments is worth the friction it causes. In short, I am ambivalent on this issue and positively abstain from voting on it. $\endgroup$
    – John Bentin
    Commented Mar 15, 2022 at 10:25
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    $\begingroup$ @JohnBentin Typically on meta, the up/down votes indicate agreement/disagreement with the opinion discussed in the post, in contrast to the meaning on the main site. See math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/30104 $\endgroup$
    – Mike Earnest
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 0:58

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