I'm never in favour of downvote/upvote mechanisms. Moderators should remove repetitive spam and illegal content. Everything else can, and should, be addressed by counter-comments and discussion.
I would, however, like to sort by most commented.
Similarly, HN could have 'reacts' that express a psychological or emotional state, or an opinion, or quality. Slashdot has forever had moderation points that have qualifiers like "Funny", "Insightful", "Flamebait", etc. This tells you why something has the points it has, which can lessen the emotional panic and internal threat you experience when you get downvoted to hell, or enhance a feeling when you get upvoted. This, on a large scale, changes how people act, by allowing them to receive and give qualitative comment feedback.
And it should be trivial to add sorting/filtering of any of those things. (That's another feature Slashdot has since forever... you can hide comments below a threshold of points)
(And yes, Slashdot is a tire fire of a "community", it's just the example that comes to mind. GitHub comments also have reacts!)