I actually think StackExchange is quite well designed to optimize for good questions and answers. Such as TFA!
But the way they delete chatrooms is off brand. If you want to incentivize people to chat in chat instead of in comments, make sure chat is actually usable. That means not deleting chatrooms after a few days!
Chatrooms are freezed, not deleted, if there's enough content. The only reason why they are deleted is when there are less than 10 messages or 3 participants (don't quote me on that).
Actual rules:
> Rooms will exist indefinitely, so long as there is at least one person actively talking in the room. A room is considered worth retaining if it has more than 15 messages by at least 2 users.
So did this room get lost in a middleground where there were too many messages for a comment section but too few to retain the chatroom?
That's obviously not a good outcome. Either the threshold for moving comments to chat needs to be moved up, or the threshold for deleting a chatroom needs to be moved down.
Edit: Wait, none of this makes sense! We can tell from the Internet Archive that there were at least 15 comments. So where is the room?
But the way they delete chatrooms is off brand. If you want to incentivize people to chat in chat instead of in comments, make sure chat is actually usable. That means not deleting chatrooms after a few days!