Post History

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  An answer can be good and deserving of upvotes and yet, two years later, be out of date.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.


[^1]: 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.