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Yesterday I upvoted a comment that had interesting links. I didn't do any other activity in that question apart from giving my upvote to that comment because it had some links I wanted to check later.

Now a day has passed and I want to view that comment to bookmark those links, but I can't see any way on Stack Overflow to see comments that I've upvoted. Can I see these votes? If not, why is this feature missing?

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  • 2
    Comment is 2nd class citizen - so it's normal that one or two things about it is missing...
    – nhahtdh
    Sep 23, 2012 at 6:17
  • Workaround I've used is to Ctrl-H review history. Tedious but better than nothing. Thankfully your own comment upvotes are highlighted: some pages I go back to many times, and I love being able to jump right to the parts I care about.
    – Bob Stein
    Jun 13, 2019 at 20:45

1 Answer 1

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Comments, as has been said in the past, are second class citizens. They are ephemeral, which means that when they cease to serve their purpose they get deleted.

This makes it quite useless for a feature to exist for browsing the ones you upvoted: they might not be there anymore. While you can see the votes you cast on posts (questions and answers), which could be deleted or not, these are originally meant to stay. You can find them like this:

  1. Click on your username above (i.e. go to your profile);
  2. Choose the tab "votes";
  3. Here they are, divided by category.
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    I'm giving you upvote for caring to answer, thanks. So summarizing the answers, "Can I see these votes? -> No" , "why is this feature missing? -> By design".
    – Nelson
    Sep 23, 2012 at 18:48
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    @Nelson Yes. Simply because part or all of them might be deleted so the "summary" of that would be incomplete.
    – Alenanno
    Sep 23, 2012 at 20:40
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    @Alenanno Except that they're remembered somewhere, since if you remove the upvote, you can't replace it. Why not let us query that, if it exists? etc, etc
    – ruffin
    Nov 29, 2017 at 20:10
  • @ruffin Maybe, but what would you like to query? I mean, let's say it said "you upvoted a comment, but it's gone now so you cannot read it", where would be the usefulness of it?
    – Alenanno
    Dec 2, 2017 at 3:54
  • @Alenanno Obviously the ones that did still exist would also come back. ;^) And if I'm looking for a specific comment attached to a question I can't remember, having that id, if it's in the system, would still be extremely useful. It's in SO's datastore somewhere; let us use it!
    – ruffin
    Dec 2, 2017 at 14:43
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    An example of the haven't-thought-of-a-purpose-so-none-exist fallacy. Comments have saved my bacon plenty of times. No, they're not routinely deleted.
    – Bob Stein
    Jun 13, 2019 at 20:32
  • In my case I'm trying to find the post associated with a comment I have a screenshot of. I know I upvoted it based on the screenshot but apparently I didn't upvote the question too
    – ridderhoff
    Apr 24, 2023 at 0:18
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    Yet another thing disproving this is the fact there are badges for comments - I just received one for having 10 comments that had more than 5 votes each, so all that data is clearly being persisted, just not exposed anywhere. Nov 24, 2023 at 17:51

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