"I am not being sarcastic here but does ancestry now prefer that we have private trees?"

It appears to me that, once again, if any function might be perceived as having a "social" connotation in the eyes of the developers, it will trump ALL. The developers are no longer genealogists, they are marketers.

Plausible workaround if you want to stay public...delete the online tree and its unwanted comments and upload it again? What a pain.