Or remove comment voting altogether (a voting detox week experiment? :)). I'm a bit skeptic about how much comment voting improves the discussion quality... maybe it's completely useless, or maybe it harms more than it helps. A sort by responses may be enough if you are looking for interesting points.

Removing votes will transform this in something like the comment threads of youtube. The vote system is not perfect, but in technical discussions it usually is helpful to make the good comments float to the top.

The problem is defining good comments and having users actually follow that protocol.

To many, a comment that doesn't follow their personal logic or point of view is not a good comment. And you end up with echo chambers where only the comments that align with the majority of a community pop up, while the extremists (for lack of a better term) of a community are pushed to the bottom. Those extremists could easily be individuals sounding the alarm on something that's happening, such as skepticism for a story.

On Reddit and HN, I almost never downvote anyone because I think it's a terrible system that is too often abused and reduces the ability to have meaningful conversations about controversial topics.

As a personal rule I don't downvote grey comments unless they are very offensive or extremely wrong. And I usually upvote grey comments in spite I disagree with them, unless they are offensive or very wrong.

YouTube already has comment voting. So does Reddit. Doesn't seem to be a trend in regulating comment quality. OTOH a decade ago I found the lack of comment voting on FARK to be refreshing.

Comment voting is good to filter out spam/off topic and then sadly it can be used to create an echo chamber where dissenting opinions of all sorts gets shut down.

Track up and down votes separately. To compute the effective score, square the number of up votes and then subtract the number of down votes.

Sorting by responses just makes the controversial ones go to the top.

Or upvote/downvote could be replaced by two completely value-free congruent triangles, pointing in opposite directions.

Eventually we'll wind up with Slashdot-style scoring.