I think Stack Exchange has worked a lot in recent years in improving the overall positivity of the site, and it’s been effective.
I’ve noticed they try to be a little more subtle about showing you your downvotes so it doesn’t hit so hard - I think downvotes subtract a smaller amount of reputation points than upvotes add. Also, there seem to be more protocols in place to help new people ask better quality questions or editing them to improve quality.
Anyway, I recently noticed you can’t edit other people’s comments, as an editor. I feel like this could actually be beneficial. It seems like comments don’t currently have the “self-regulating” aspect of much of the rest of the site. You can be a lot more free in how you write them, and they basically seem to stick around forever.
You can flag comments, though, so I’m wondering if the top moderators can actually edit and/or delete comments.
I feel like one remaining “pain point” for me as a user, being a sensitive person, is that sometimes people still express a bit of negativity in the comments. Sometimes it’s a natural, well-intended expression of sentiment that a question isn’t well-formatted, or is unclear, or the premises of the question do not appear to make sense, or the question appears to be either obvious or nonsensically asking for something either impossible or tautological, etc.
Those little comments like “I have no idea what you are asking”, “I am confused”, “Do you really think that?”, etc, still kind of add up for me, as well as downvotes.
Barring Stack Exchange maybe allowing more comment editing and maybe even making downvotes more hidden - like something for moderators to see but there being no need for an asker to see their question is at -13 instead of just having no upvotes -
I was wondering if you can / should just regularly flag any comment that does not seem optimal. Not abusive or a breach of conduct or anything like that, just small stuff like there’s one small, minorly negative choice of word in there that could be improved; or a comment that asked for clarifying information in the past but is now irrelevant since the post was updated in response to it.