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’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