Do comments have any SEO value? What happens if I put them under a “show/hide comments” button?

I’ve a got a (Wordpress-based) blog that I’m planning to upgrade the theme. The blog gets relatively a good amount of comments from the followers, some of them add something to the article but most of them don’t.

So I’m wondering, do these comments have any SEO value? On my new theme I want to place the comment under a show/hide button. By default the comments will be hidden, the user needs to click “show comments” do have them displayed.

I’m doing these to make the articles less cluttered, and some of my articles get a lot of comments (50-100). Is that a good idea? Will this hurt my organic search?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or feedback.