Feature: add upvotes/downvotes to comments

[VinceKaj]

Reason: comments are often use for corrections and clarifications to answers. Those clarifications (like the answers themselves) could be correct or wrong. (Example)

Upvotes are a pretty good mechanism for checking the validity of answers, so I think the same logic should be extended to comments, so users can see if other users generally agree with comment statements or not.

(if collapsing negative answers becomes a feature, perhaps voting on comments would also be useful to collapse irrelevant/incorrect comments).

I can try to make a PR myself by just mimicking the logic of how answer upvotes work, but I have no experience with the BI code, so I'll probably only sit down to try this at the end of May.

[kshxtij]

I think keeping the comments in a chronological order is pretty important as it's used for discussions of the answer itself very often.

I think ideal behaviour would be to continue the conversation replying to the comment that's wrong but maybe instead of upvote/downvote, we could extend the reporting/mod functionality to also flag comments not just answers.

@yutotakano what do you think?

[VinceKaj]

Good point about conversation flow, maybe no collapse, then.

I think a report function would just increase workload of admins. What is flagging? If the comment got removed, readers may miss information (it would create the same conversation-flow problem).

[yutotakano]

I agree that chronological order is important, but that wouldn't rule out implementing up/down votes entirely. It could be done like StackOverflow comments, so that everything remains chronological ordering but maybe there's a preview of the most upvoted comment when it's not fully expanded.

I'm kind of against it though, only because I feel like that'd be a UI overload with buttons and numbers everywhere if the current design is reused for comments. Usually a reply comment or separate answer would do the trick. StackOverflow's design works since the upvote/downvote button is so subtle for comments, it's like 10 pixels big at most. Not sure if we can pull off something similar.

Open to ideas if this is a common enough problem that warrants a fix though!!