The results of the comment voting experiment have been tabulated and analyzed. Tens of thousands of members have been upvoting comments and are extensively using that feature so that stays in.

On the other hand, while comment downvoting had affected approximately less than a hundred members, it was subject to abuse by an even smaller minority of users (less than 10 and one user in particular). Since such a small number of users were able to actively disrupt some of our sub-communities, I've removed the ability to downvote story and blog comments other than for the authors and co-authors of the content the comment is made on as well as for moderators (this is actually the way it had been a few years ago if you remember and were here that long). I've also reset anyone with a negative comment rep to zero (not many and among those that did, most had a -1).

Since comment voting was meant to be an experiment on how well the community can police itself, removing the ability to downvote effectively nullifies that aspect. I usually try to let the community work its own problems out without much intervention so to reduce reliance on how individual moderators could interpet each case but in this instance, I've given the moderators the ability to delete flagged comments reported to us at their own discretion based on whether or not the comment breaks our terms of use. We'll see how it goes from here on out.