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.
This is something I’m currently experimenting with. I understand your point of view, but boosts are the only way to increase the range in the fediverse, and they are extremely important. I am definitely open to discussing this topic. I will come back to it later.
rel:
Thanks, this is a really helpful roundup of links – a lot to consider.
This comment is especially interesting. It makes me think kbin should stop translating “upvotes” and “downvotes” into Fediverse concepts, and should instead embrace the Fediverse concepts and present them directly: instead of upvote and downvote buttons we could have 🚀 (boost) and ⭐️ (favorite) buttons, perhaps with a combined score for sorting. It would mean abandoning downvotes, but it sounds like downvotes are a problem anyway.
That would give us a reputation system that makes it clear what you’re doing when you boost a post or comment, but also one that won’t be jarring to users of other apps and instances.
This makes sense.
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!
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.
I’m left to wonder if having both upvotes and boosts might be seen as novel and interesting to the Reddit crowd. Something that makes the fedi groupoverse feel like Reddit++.
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
Yes they are
