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If our question gets upvotes, we gain our reputation. People think our question is useful or good, so they 'award' us reputations.

If our answer gets upvotes, we also gain our reputation. That means people are appreciating us because our answer is good and helpful, or it answers the question.

However, sometimes I see some very good comments which get a lot of upvotes. They can be funny comments, useful comments, or even comments which is actually a complete answer for the question. Such comments can get hundreds of upvotes depending on the popularity of the question.

The 'authors' of such comments really deserve reputations!

So I think that should we award reputations for good comments? For example, each upvote gets +1 rep or +2 rep.

I even think that we should set bounty for comments!

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    I think that those who add the problem-solving comments know that they won't get reputation for that, and are fine with it. If you are after reputation points, use an answer. If you just want to solve a problem that is (sort of) obvious to you very quickly, use a comment. – marmot Dec 25 '18 at 15:16
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    You do realize that reputation is just a number. You can earn reputation do get palyndroms, but you can't buy a burger with reputation. – Johannes_B Dec 25 '18 at 15:49
  • @Johannes_B Yes! Reputation is only a number, and I personally don't take much care of it. However, taking this question as an example, I know that reputation is important for new users who want to be here for long (i.e., not just to ask a single question). They want to achieve something in a new environment (so did I when I was still a new user in TeX.SX). – user156344 Dec 26 '18 at 5:18
  • I totally agree with @marmot. – user156344 Dec 26 '18 at 5:19
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This site is a site of "questions and answers". It is true that some contributors respond in comments. This profoundly changes the nature of this site which thus becomes more and more a site of questions and comments. A comment that gave the answer, nobody answers the question anymore, which then makes no sense.

Giving points for comments is in my opinion a bad idea: as it is much faster to leave a comment than write an answer, in order to be the first to answer, more and more people will respond via comments and not by making real answers.

Very quickly, this site will be only the shadow of itself: there will be no more answers built.

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    Believe me, if there would be only +1 or +2 for a good comment, none of the rep - addicts here will be prevented to post an answer that gives at least +10 -- and the voting mechanism here will upvote them to the sky, regardless, how good or bad the answer is – user31729 Dec 25 '18 at 10:24
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    More or less mirrors the position of the Powers: for once, they are right :) – Joseph Wright♦ Dec 25 '18 at 10:25
  • @ChristianHupfer We are seeing more and more requests to close questions because the question has been resolved in the comments. – AndréC Dec 25 '18 at 10:28
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    I don't think in order to be the first to answer is the reason for anybody to write comments. Answers in comments often are written because the question is not very clear and the comment is more a guess instead of a solid answer. Another reason could be because the question is likely a duplicate but finding a good duplicate often takes more effort than writing an answer, so users might be tempted to just leave a quick comment. – user36296 Dec 25 '18 at 14:26
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    a conscientious reader can make a followup comment asking the person who hit the right answer in a comment to post an answer. in my experience, many of the questions "closed because it was answered in comments" have been "abandoned" by the person who asked the question (not been seen for months), or the question was not really clear in the first place and thus not of much help to future seekers. – barbara beeton Dec 25 '18 at 14:29
  • @marmot please stop these personal attacks that are unfounded on meta. The fact that you wrote an answer in a comment does not give you any ownership rights over the answers, since I can prove that I knew the same answer since I used it in other answers long before. Your attitude makes me think that you are writing comments to prevent other users from answering questions that then become your property. – AndréC Dec 25 '18 at 15:24
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    You are the one who is aggressive. In 99% if the cases, the one writing the later post knows the stuff already. Nevertheless it is a good practice to acknowledge prior posts going in the same direction. – marmot Dec 25 '18 at 15:27
  • @marmot I only read zarko's answer, which is the classic approach when you visit a page on this site: first you read the answers. As there were other ways of doing things, I answered them. Nothing more than that. – AndréC Dec 25 '18 at 15:34
  • @AndréC I am not referring to a single incident. And it is not my fault that you do not read prior posts. I stop here. Stop going after me. – marmot Dec 25 '18 at 15:40
  • @marmot Calm down, I'm not suing you, we have the same interest in TikZ issues. – AndréC Dec 25 '18 at 15:43
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    When a question is so unclear that a team of five people have to brainstorm for 30 minutes .... how is anybody supposed to write an answer? There is a comment function for a reason. If comments weren't useful, we wouldn't have the function. – Johannes_B Dec 25 '18 at 15:54
  • @Johannes_B What question are you referring to? – AndréC Dec 25 '18 at 15:56
  • Why should I refer to a specific question? I am a member of this community for years and have several such incidents. – Johannes_B Dec 25 '18 at 15:58
  • @Johannes_B What incidents have you had? – AndréC Dec 25 '18 at 16:00
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    Merry Christmas André – Johannes_B Dec 25 '18 at 16:00
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This has been addressed at the network-level and was considered . The main reason here is that comments are fleeting in nature and meant for clarification, not answering. Sure, sometimes an answer is written in comment as a way of testing whether the suggestion actually solves the OP's problem. However, in general, answers are written up as posts, not comments, where they receive the regular reputation-related voting treatment.

Reference:

  • Have the reasons that convinced administrators not to implement this feature been made public? – AndréC Dec 27 '18 at 10:33
  • @AndréC: I'm of the opinion that community consensus prevailed, coupled with the fact that it would probably have been a lot of work to include that behaviour in their coding base. – Werner Dec 27 '18 at 16:08

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