There is widespread confusion on this one.
There are three iterations of the comment feature:
- Original
- Featured/Other: Featured Comments by Kelvin Ho on Quora Product Updates
- Recommended/All: More Visibility for High-Quality Comments by Diana Gerr on Quora Product Updates
Different people have had different versions of the feature rolled out at different times. Right now (weekend of 22 April 2017), some people are being moved from Featured to Recommended, and some other people (including me) are being moved from Recommended back to Original.
Which makes me conclude that Featured comments are being removed, but that Recommended comments aren’t: the move back to Original is a temporary glitch (though one I am ecstatic about).
How do I feel?
- Featured and Recommended were overengineering the problem of how to manage adverse comments, and the extra click is moderately annoying.
- I don’t have a whole lot of adverse comments to scroll through. But I don’t trust Quora to identify and sequester adverse comments; there have been a lot of innocuous and positive comments sequestered.
- In response to users complaining that Featured was promoting anything they’d upvote, Quora decided to recommend comments ignoring what the user upvoted. (The criterion appears to be somehow tied up with Top Writer status or being followed by the user.)
- So users asking for more control over what gets promoted ended up with less.
- The lesson being: do not give Quora feedback.
- Clearly opinion is split on whether three-tier comments (promoted, not-promoted, collapsed) was a good thing. I think it was not a good thing: I much prefer eyeballing through a single list of comments.