hide all comments from questions and answers

Question

It would be nice if it were possible to choose to hide all comments from questions and answers. 

Perhaps this should even be the default: Readers should not have to extract the  most relevant parts of the discussion for themselves. These should be integrated into the question or answer, or be turned into a separate answer.

Edit: I didn't mean to hide it from those who want to read them but just to hide them behind a button saying ''37 comments'', say.

Comments

I agree that the possibility customise the view of the site to hide comments, maybe a button in the user profile, would be useful. But I disagree with hiding all comments by default and personally think that we should by no means adopt the fanatic deletism (of comments and other useful information) practised in particular on sites strictly following the SE way of living (physics is among them). I personally prefer the academic point of view applied by MathOverflow to preserve useful information in any form, including comments...

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@Dilaton: This seems to be a misunderstanding; see my edit. Anyone should be able to read hidden comments, but they shouldn't be shown simply because they exist. Sometimes the discussion is far longer than the answers....

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This is easily possible from the admin panel but has a huge problem. The comment voting plugin does not work when the hidden comments are expanded. By the way, has someone changed the comment editor to the basic editor? I can't check in the admin panel because of my poor internet connection at the moment. 

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Having the option to collapse a long comment stream is useful when the comments become too long, otherwise the pages become un-navigable. It might be possible to ask users to voluntarily hide comments that are no longer relevant, due to changes in the answer, keeping only ones that are informative.