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I understand the idea of voting for a great comment, but why does the comment's score change colors at five-ish up votes? Comment votes don't seem to give reputation, or anything else, for being great.

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All the votes do is help to visually identify good or insightful comments. You are correct, the color of the vote count does change at (IIRC) around 5 upvotes, and then again around 10. The specific color is tied to the site you're on; for example, the color becomes more orange on Stack Overflow.

Also, when the page initially loads, there will be at most 5 comments below each post. The rest of the comments can be expanded out, but the initial comments are the five highest-scoring.

Other than that, the score serves no purpose. However, I will say that even though I don't get reputation from a comment vote, I personally like to see that someone liked my comment and thought it was good or insightful.

For more information, see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/comments-top-n-shown/

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    The score changing colour upon lots of votes is a nice little touch, IMHO - a clear visual clue that the comment is "hot"
    – Jonik
    Jun 30, 2009 at 12:18
  • Why "around" 5 or 10 votes? Isn't it exactly 5 or 10?
    – Daniel Daranas
    Jul 30, 2009 at 13:14
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    @Daniel: I wasn't sure of the exact numbers. I'm pretty sure it's 5 and 10, but I don't know for sure. So I said "around".
    – Kyle Cronin
    Jul 30, 2009 at 16:01
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I still think there should be a badge, even a bronze one, for getting 10 upvotes on a comment.

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Expanding on Kyle, the primary purpose of them was to get the best comments loaded on the page for all requests (instead of via AJAX) - so they can be indexed by search engines/visible to all users.

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