Needless Derailing
Given how often I am reading recent threads that get derailed, to the point that a new user commented:
I’m amazed at how unhelpful 90% of these replies were.
This was just 2 days after this thread discussing the issue. I’m fine for some hard moderation until people calm down when Apple Pay is launched and people accept that the app will change.
Otherwise
Conversation off-topic isn’t always stifled (example). More often than not as I see it, it’s new topics that are merged into existing ones. Sometimes though it might just be to reduce the number of posts in a thread and bring the topic back on point. Because, if you’re coming in late to a thread, are you going to read 250+ posts?