Update: this has now been resolved by changes to Kbin’s voting system:
From now on, upvotes work just like on Lemmy - they are equivalent to Mastodon’s “favourite.” You can boost a post using the button that replaced “favourite.”
Original post below:
When I joined kbin.social yesterday I couldn’t understand why people were so stingy with upvotes. On Reddit I’d liberally upvote anything I thought contributed to the conversation, even if I disagreed with it or if it was just a question I thought deserved attention.
After seeing how kbin federates with other instances, I understand why people are reluctant to upvote things here: an upvote on kbin manifests as a boost in the Fediverse.
I think those two things are conceptually different. A boost in the fediverse implies enthusiastic endorsement, and also brings things into other people’s timelines without surrounding context. It also makes kbin accounts very busy things to follow from a microblog app like Mastodon.
I’m curious if others here agree, and if @ernest is open to us brainstorming other ideas/approaches, or it’s considered a critical/unmovable aspect of kbin’s interactions with the fediverse.
I get this too, having up and downvotes is like “speaking the language” of Reddit and would enhance adoption through familiar UX. That’s a big positive for something that aims to serve as a Reddit replacement.
At the same time, it’s a headache to translate into ActivityPub, because as OP said, upvoting and boosting are very different concepts. They both aim to increase visibility, but an upvote differs from a boost in that 1) an upvote produces a gradual increase in visibility; 2) you can opt to ignore vote counts entirely, for example, by sorting by new posts; and 3) the source of an upvote is (generally) not public, whereas you’re always told which user has boosted a post.
Maybe Lemmy/Kbin/both could implement a system with upvotes working as in Lemmy, but also the option to boost a post or comment? I honestly think that’d be the best of both worlds.
Instead of just upvotes/downvotes, it’d be upvotes/downvotes/boosts
Favourite = Upvote
Empty button that does nothing except change colour = Downvote
Boost = Gold