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Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

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Q&A Can we allow answerers to see if asker upvoted them?

As I thought through this question and its several answers, I kept asking myself, "what value would it bring to the respondent or to Codidact to know that the querent specifically cared about their...

posted 3y ago by JBH‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar JBH‭ · 2021-08-11T18:45:33Z (over 3 years ago)
As I thought through this question and its several answers, I kept asking myself, "what value would it bring to the respondent or to Codidact to know that the querent specifically cared about their answer?"

I'm not qualified to go into the issue of psychological dependencies, but that's what this is touching on, isn't it? At best the flag would indicate that the answer was specifically useful to the querent (if knowing that actually has value...), but at worst it's only a way for the respondent to feel socially accepted in a specific way. What would it mean, after all, if the querent *didn't* flag an answer? Is that feedback without comment useful to the respondent? Should any respondent care that the querent specifically liked (or disliked by virtue of lacking the informative) their answer?

Inevitably services like Codidact gain an element of sociality &mdash; but they shouldn't. The world has progressed too far already toward the idea that everyone's a winner, everyone's a hero, everyone's a contributor &mdash; when in reality some are more valuable than others and every effort to "remedy" that simply lowers the value of those who are more valuable. Said another way, every aspect of sociality is a tool that can be used abusively to harm, and history has regrettably shown that humanity is very good at using a tool to harm.

So why provide the tool in the first place, unless there is a specific value to Codidact for doing so? (I frankly can't think of one.)

To that end, my recommendation is that Codidact's developers focus only on tools that serve Codidact and nothing more. Yes, individual users may benefit from those tools, but the opportunity for harm is strongly limited when the focus is the benefit of the service.