I've noticed that probably six months ago, vouching a comment would immediately return it to a live state ~90% of the time. Presumably because as soon as it hits the dead state it no longer gets flagged, so one is all that's needed to put it back over the threshold. Recently, my vouches have revived comments 0% of the time. I'm not sure if the algorithm or UI changed, or if I was simply using the feature too much for someone's liking and they disabled it for me on the back end?
I've come across many, many helpful and thoughtful comments that I can't revive simply because this thing that should work has stopped even though I have about 30x the karma needed for it.
The problem is you have to have dead comments turned on to vouch, but the ability to flag comments is default with enough karma.
I didn't even know there were so many decent flagged comments until I turned on dead.
I think it would be cool to have a mechanism where if someone's flagged comments get vouched for so many times they lose their ability to flag for a period of time.
I just went to reply to you that it doesn’t mention comment flagging. But then I realized the flag button is apparently only there while typing a reply.
Would be interested to learn the proportion of flagged:vouched comments.