The "Hot Nework Questions" feature of SE is a big mess. It ends up almost completely devaluing the voting in threads that were hot, because then the majority of votes tend to be placed by recreational readers with less expertise than the typical reader of this site. Such threads should be stamped with a big scarlet letter warning readers that the votes are even less useful than they normally are.

@amWhy I'm not meaning to argue anything with the sentence you quote. I always wear my mod hat, even when I play imaginary squash.

@BillDubuque Agreed.

@quid What is the basis for your claim that this site is not among the worst affected by the Hot Network drive-by damage?

@BillDubuque Use comments to comment on the post. Use chat for chat.

@BillDubuque I don't recall saying that, sorry. You can always use chat for further discussion, and keep the comment section for comments pertinent to the post. If it pleases you, I can always paste the comments to chat.

@Pedro Then I don't understand your penultimate comment. Precisely what do you think belongs in chat and why did you ping me about that? It makes no sense.

@BillDubuque You started a discussion with quid (I forgot to ping quid) that was useful, but was not related to my answer. I thus urged you (and forgot to urge quid) to discuss such matters in chat.

@quid Please use chat for extended discussions.

Even if the discussions are on topic, extended discussions are meant for chat. Remember the system raises automatic flags for extended discussions.

@Pedro Correction, quid started the discussion. In any case, Meta is for discussion. If you post an answer on meta then you should be more patient with folks discussing points related to it, even if they swerve onto tangents.

@BillDubuque First point granted. Meta is for discussion, but this does not entitle arbitrary freedom. Shooting ranges are for guns, but you don't go to shooting ranges and shoot the place up. Let us be responsible with the use of site. In particular, although I mentioned "hot" questions, this doesn't entitle the comments to be swarmed with a discussion on whether MSE qualifies as this or that regarding those questions, or why this is so, or what can be done to fix it.

@Pedro While I can sympathize with your inbox ping pains, if users think hot questions are the primary source of such problems then they should be allowed to discuss such matters as they see fit. And such discussion shouldn't be hidden in low-visibility chat pages.

@BillDubuque It seems you're giving more value to the publicity gained by a discussion in comments than the discussion itself. You can always make a meta post to discuss the specific topic you want, instead of having to try and sort out the limits of things in here. Given the excess of comments, this will be moved to chat.

@Pedro But it was not I who raised the tangential point about whether or not MSE suffers more from the Hot list than other sites.. Rather, I only asked quid to back up that claim. Again, you should be targeting quid, not I.