I've been wondering what the purpose of comment voting is and a recent channel talk post inspired me to ask everyone else. Originally, comment voting wasn't voting at all, but either applauding, marking as inappropriate, or flagging as spam. As I remember it, an aesthetic decision was made to change the 'applaud comment' and 'mark inappropriate' links to a pair of arrows, because the second line of text under comments was found to be too busy. Since that time, comment voting has evolved into more of a mechanism of agreement/disagreement with the content of the comment, instead of its original intent of applauding a well crafted comment (regardless of the opinion expressed) or marking it as inappropriate for being an ad hom attack, bigoted or otherwise hateful speech, etc.
My question to everyone is whether the community sees this as a good thing or a bad thing, and if there is any desire to return comment voting to its original purpose.
Submitted by jonny
My question to everyone is whether the community sees this as a good thing or a bad thing, and if there is any desire to return comment voting to its original purpose.

I don't think there should be any hard rules against downvoting comments; they aren't a significant source of star points to warrant that in my opinion.(especially when compared to the number of comments made versus comments that receive a star point).
The "problem" with comment voting is similar to the asymmetry with videos. Once a comment gets 5 votes, it is much more likely to get votes in the double digits, especially since it's size is increased, while other comments will be stopped at 4 votes.
That's the same with videos, though, and I don't see that as a bad thing.
But the change is made and going back might not be the answer.
Thanks, Videosift.
I however do think the iconology must change, as it gives a false impressions, you are not voting for views like one is better then the other rather you should single out what contributes and what doesn't contribute to a discussion.
Thus instead of Up and Down arrows, it should be either a +, - or ! for abuse violations.
I think Joystiq nailed it.
Great idea Farhad.