Though this is unrelated: Freedom of Speech is one cornerstone of most modern democracies, but not a necessity for democracy in general. He did and can and no one stopped him from doing so. Speaking of Freedom of Speech, stating your opinion on other peoples' opinions is perfectly fine. If you want to show your pride of a chapter, you can easily leave a comment or write a note in the chapter. That will be even more effective than pushing the Like button.
The quest had already been completed. All that remained was investigating an apparent oversight that failed to retroactively apply it. Here's what you and I (and I believe everybody) can agree on: all self-Likes should be cleared if the ability is removed completely. As someone who didn't actually employ the tactic, I took the word of gene.sis at face value and assumed this had been done. For whatever reason, you ignored that word and instead insisted gene.sis claimed the exact opposite, that gene.sis claimed the change wasn't retroactive, rather than acknowledge these words before pointing out that you found evidence to the contrary. Besides delaying the investigation gene.sis eventually launched, you also successfully painted yourself as someone who doesn't care what anyone else says to the degree that you don't even bother to read it. Except that no one knows it's your Like. It's instead displayed as if it was someone else's Like. C'mon, I even nudged you towards the start of a good argument. Let me spell it out: display the names of the people who pressed Like at the bottom of the page. That way your message is communicated without being misrepresented on the page itself. You'd still have to do something about the story map and sidebar, but you'd at least have an opening gambit. The benefit has already been explained ad nauseam. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you get to ignore it and insist it was never there. I'm going to ignore the melodrama because of something you said: Instead, I'm going to focus on the fact that Democracy, in this case, ruled against you. While this single thread may have shown a few people on your side, the majority instead made it clear that gaming the system with self-Likes should not be tolerated. Democracy won out in this case. Freedom of Speech also represents that people can use as many racial slurs as they want whenever they want without fear of criminal prosecution, and grants the security that said slurs by themselves do not meet the grounds to justify in a court of law any violence or other crimes perpetrated against them. It does not represent that someone cannot call them racists, that people will not boycott establishments that employ them, that their employers will not fire them, and that violence or other crimes will not be perpetrated against them. More simply, Freedom of Speech ensures words alone are not criminal, but does not prevent the social consequences. Just as Hypnoticus had every right to be a drama queen apparently covering its ears, SeriousBrainDamage and I have every right to call out such behavior. It's within your rights to choose to dislike that we said such things, but that does not change the fact that you posting something nearly identical in meaning to that of the SeriousBrainDamage post to tell SeriousBrainDamage to not make said post is outrageously hypocritical.
CHYOA is not a democracy. It is the mod's dictatorship, and we are lucky that they allow input from the masses.