Ive read the announcement and it seems this passed by a lot of people.

It passed by me. Both @reazuliqbal and @josephsavage pointed it out to me earlier and I skimmed it and thought "surely they couldn't be doing that." It wasn't until they confirmed in it the recent blog post that I was sure this was what they were really doing.

The upvote system just isnt straight forward enough

Definitely.