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Replace anonymous voting by public reactions
In this answer, Luap had said,"Reputation can produce negative behaviors" (Unfortunately I lost some links of Forum Codidact's reputation discussion).
We earn/lose reputation from voting of "anonymous users" (We just can't know who had upvoted and downvoted). But, we could get a reaction from specific/known users (We can know who had reacted on your post).
I would like to give reactions priority over reputation. I want the reaction score shown instead of reputation in profile or user tab
I want to show something more in profile. Profile will show Outdated, Bad, Dangerous and Worked for me.
- Outdated : It was working earlier. (So, no negative credit).
- Worked for me : It is working. (positive credit)
- Bad : The answer needs some improvements. (leaving it to staff/public) (I want it cause, some user (Me) can't write answer in English properly. If they correct everything than that user should retract his reaction. Earlier I had answered a question then I asked why I got downvote and Olin said it's for bad English. After writing the answer properly that user didn't retract however, which is totally not good (telling it from experience of Math SE). )
- Dangerous : Never try it (negative credit).
Above context would change depending on community. Questioner gets nothing cause they are here looking for help. Bad questions can't get good answer until it is understandable. So, questioner needs nothing. Although, there's upvote and downvote system. But no one will care about it. If someone creates a new account then react on his own post. Which post didn't work for anyone. Then moderator should have access to retract that reaction. Currently, some user creates new account and upvote his own post only for reputation, which isn't good.
In EE community, there's a duplicate account of Olin Lathrop. His name is Olin Elthrop. Not only one there's two account. I guess, someone else had created those accounts. He/She could use those accounts to take revenge (by downvoting posts) or, he/she could upvote his own post. But with reactions, we can know who had reacted to post. Moderator can't retract upvote or, downvote but they should have access to retract (remove) other's reaction (which I already mentioned earlier). Even, users don't have to explain why they had downvoted a post. But, they have to explain why it is dangerous while reacting.
In short: I want to have and show the reaction score instead of reputation. I was thinking of meta sites for a long time. But, I didn't find out way for meta (if reaction doesn't exist in meta)
1 answer
I see a lot of frustration in your post. I'm sorry you're having a rough time on Codidact. I'm particularly sympathetic to the language barrier; languages are hard to gain fluency in (at least as adults) and English is especially challenging because of its "eclectic" history. I was once yelled at in another language for not knowing it well enough, and that sort of thing is demoralizing. As always, if you see something that looks rude to you, please flag it.
Votes are the primary "currency" on Codidact. Voters can sometimes be mistaken, biased, or committing fraud,[1] but that's true of any feedback system. We talked early on about making votes public (perhaps optionally, perhaps not), but that opens people to the flip side of what you're describing: you downvote a post for good, stated reasons, and the author disagrees or is upset and retaliates with downvotes against you. Or, if you think public votes would prevent that, the person starts withholding upvotes for your good content, and the absence of votes is not something that can be audited.
We're adding reactions to support other types of specific feedback. An answer can be good and deserving of upvotes and yet, two years later, be out of date. It's not really fair to the author for people to go back and turn upvotes into downvotes, but we also want readers to know there's an issue. Or we want to give the author a way to mark an answer as "this worked" (like "accepted" on other platforms), but why limit it to the author? The author might not come back, but other people who had the same problem can indicate "this worked", too. Reactions need to be public so that readers can evaluate the claims; on EE you'll probably evaluate a claim that an answer is dangerous differently if it was made by Olin Lathrop or by a new user who has never answered a question.
I expect reactions to be relatively rare, but voting is essential. Replacing voting with reactions would have one of two effects. One possibility is that it would discourage participation: it would be even harder to see a number go up (because reactions are more rare), and many posts would get no reactions so people would feel ignored and unappreciated. This would be very bad for our communities. The other possibility is that it would change the meaning of reactions; people would use "it works" without actually having tested it because they want to reward what looks like a good answer. It would turn reactions into (public) votes, but with labels that are not always correct. This would be bad for our communities.
How (or whether) to show reactions someone received on a user profile is a question that hasn't come up before. I don't know if they should be shown with the individual posts in the list, or in the stats, or not at all. That's worth a separate meta discussion.
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If you suspect voting fraud, please flag or use the "contact us" link. Moderators can't see who voted on what (even I can't), but there are people on the team who can look at the data. We also limit the number of votes a new user can cast. ↩︎
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