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.

  • ernest
    4•1 year ago

    I’ve been thinking about it lately, and I even wanted to change it quickly, but it turns out it’s not easy, and I wouldn’t want to make such a big change hastily. It will have to wait a bit because I have a queue of critical tasks, and more external matters are diverting my attention. I’ve also decided to make the placement of the boost/fav entirely configurable by the instance admin.

    Honestly, I love the current state, I’m very used to it, and I would like to keep it. At least on my smaller instance. I also have plans for a short interactive tutorial that will briefly explain how the most important features on the website work.

    However, I completely understand the arguments that some change is needed. But making it configurable won’t take much more time than making it fixed. Downvotes won’t be federated.

    There is another option worth considering as well: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/15

    Thanks for the feedback!

    • fr0g
      4•1 year ago

      I do like the idea of both likes and boosts adding to the score (but not double) which I think (I used translataion) the last comment in the codeberg issue is making.

      And even at the risk of making things more complicated I wonder if it would make sense to have separate logic for threads and replies. I think for threads, upvoting to increase relevance/have it be shown to more people in the community makes way more sense, while within the conversation, I feel it correlates much more strongly to simpe approval/disapproval. And if you already are IN the thread thread, you probably want to see upvoted comments, but if you aren’t, getting random comments from random convos boosted into your timeline is just confusing.

      So I think there’s some arguments for separating thread/comment logic, which also opens up new avenues for UI.

      Main threads could even get rid of the upvotes/downvote buttons and have one single button “increase reach” button that corelates with fedi-boosting and also is used as the scoring mechanism.

      Replies could have the classic up and downvotes with the upvote correlating to likes.

      And I guess both main threads and replies could have a separate smaller button that correlates to likes for main threads and boosts for replies.