| Also one of the answers on that question was deleted by an employee (! — itself an unusual event) for satirically opposing the change. More information here. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587 Overall, the biggest complaint against this is: 1. Not enough people vote on questions or answers. We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that vote vs. those that comment. I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587 Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than 'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the issue with not enough people voting. Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement mechanism for people to post more answers). If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is Bad™. The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to vote? Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work (the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the issue. There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces. |