Do people still interpret reactions that way? I never have. A negative reaction - even on platforms where a downvote does mean negative fake internet points - doesn’t mean, “I deem you a bad person.” It means, “I didn’t like your content,” e.g. your post when it’s a forum. That’s why the reaction is permanently tied to the post that triggered it.
This isn’t directed at Roland:
I don’t understand someone who takes, “I didn’t like something you wrote,” as a personal affront, that requires retaliation against something the reactor wrote. No one would respond to a written out post that way, right? If you write up a treatise on how to fix farming in A20, and someone says they think you’re all wrong in a reply, you don’t go looking for one of their posts to rant against out of spite, right? Or if someone downvotes your YouTube video or your Reddit post, you don’t track down the user and downvote some of their content, and shake your fist if they’re just a lurker with nothing to downvote.
I guess my point is, there are Kuosimodos on every site where content has an up/down rating system (and as Roland points out, we don’t even have that). Usually you don’t know or don’t care who they are; you just look at how people react in the aggregate.