It's just not that important. Accidents happen but cancel each other out due to statistical noise in busy threads. No single vote is going to doom a worthy comment to undeserved obscurity, or a crappy comment to endless notoriety.
The problem is the visibility of comments changes their potential for future upvotes or downvotes. If you have a comment sitting on top of a thread, it will get much more visibility and opportunities for a statistically good sample of upvotes and downvotes. But if you downvote a comment and relegate it to the bottom (or gasp, the faded out text), then it can be very difficult for it to recover.
A more out-of-the-box solution to all of these problems is to have both comment order and story order be probabilistic rather than absolute, which could help guarantee everything enough visibility to get the fair compliment of upvotes/downvotes. But then again that is much more complicated than other potential solutions (assuming the problem is even large enough to care to fix).
Comments
It's just not that important. Accidents happen but cancel each other out due to statistical noise in busy threads. No single vote is going to doom a worthy comment to undeserved obscurity, or a crappy comment to endless notoriety.
The problem is the visibility of comments changes their potential for future upvotes or downvotes. If you have a comment sitting on top of a thread, it will get much more visibility and opportunities for a statistically good sample of upvotes and downvotes. But if you downvote a comment and relegate it to the bottom (or gasp, the faded out text), then it can be very difficult for it to recover.
A more out-of-the-box solution to all of these problems is to have both comment order and story order be probabilistic rather than absolute, which could help guarantee everything enough visibility to get the fair compliment of upvotes/downvotes. But then again that is much more complicated than other potential solutions (assuming the problem is even large enough to care to fix).