NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin

Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:

  • Upvotes & Downvotes function akin to Reddit
  • Boosts count as two Upvotes (link)
  • Favorites are added to https://kbin.social/fav if you Upvote (link)
  • Reputation Points have been updated

In addition to that, Ernest stated that "there is no connection between reputation points and sorting algorithms. It's just info in the profile" (link)

muftiboy,

how can I downboost

taurentipper,

😂

Moogly,

I think just downvote? It seems to register as a “reduce” which I think is the opposite effect of boost?

IninewCrow,
IninewCrow avatar

You have to fill out form ID-10-T and then store some kinetic energy inside a box attached to a mechanical hand in an open palm position ... the box will then be shipped to the person you are "downboosting" and when they open the box, the stored kinetic energy will activate the hand and slap them in the face ... a small audio device will be installed with the package that will play the Windows logon sound bite and then announce 'YOU'VE BEEN DOWNBOOSTED'.

dismalnow,
dismalnow avatar

Allow me to coin the term:

Can_you_change_your_username,

Hit the boost button twice. The second tap will reduce boosts.

aeternum,

technically the truth. The best kind of truth.

manillaface,
manillaface avatar

I almost wish reputation and things of that nature weren’t publicly visible. A huge part of Reddit that I hated, the circlejerk-y opinions and same tired lame jokes being told over and over again, were caused in large part by people seeking karma (and that’s not even addressing the actual posts, just the stuff in the comments). I would hate to see that eventually start to come back.

There’s obviously some downside to that and it probably warrants a more nuanced solution if anything.

Niello,

Personally a fan of a system that only count the last 30 days. It's not permanent but still let me tell at a glance if someone is likely to be a troll.

fishos,
fishos avatar

I suggested a resetting score elsewhere in here, but I really like this system. Kinda reminds me of Steam's "recent reviews" score. Would let people have a general gist of your recent behaviour. This would allow people to get better or worse and have their score reflect that, instead of one really positive/negative post in their history skewing their score for eternity.

verysoft,

Reddit turned into an echo chamber because of karma, people didn't want to express a different opinion than what the 'masses' have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma. The downvote feature itself being misused there too.

Reputation should be hidden or removed imo, keep the up/downs/boosts for sorting.

UnhappyCamper,
UnhappyCamper avatar

I feel we still need the reputation system, based on the fact that upvotes/downvotes get abused. Everyone always wants to give their 2 cents with how they feel about a comment if it invokes something in them, and upvotes/downvotes give them that power. As long as reputation doesn't effect comment/post exposure then we should be fine.

If only the boost option exists and reputation is scrapped, I believe boost will be abused in the same manor as upvotes and downvotes do on Reddit.

Providing people with an outlet still to say "I agree with this person" or "this comment is stupid or I just don't like it" I think will help mitigate the abuse of the post exposure system.

I do agree with others thoughts that reputation on a post/comment should be invisible though.

Metaright,
Metaright avatar

keep the up/downs/boosts for sorting.

This wouldn't solve the problem of downvotes being misused as an indicator of disagreement. I think it's best if it stays entirely incidental.

btaf45,

people didn't want to express a different opinion than what the 'masses' have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma

Critical difference. Reddit had groupthink literally enforced by the software. If you had negative karma in a subreddit and you tried to post, it would say "You are doing that too much, please wait 8 minutes to post again", even if your last post was 2 weeks ago.

TThor,

You have to try hard to get negative karma in a sub, or just never use it. Frankly, if a person frequents a sub and consistent say things majority of people dislike, is that person really right for that sub?

btaf45, (edited )

You have to try hard to get negative karma in a sub

You can get -60 karma on conspiracy sub for saying that witches aren't real therefore John Podesta doesn't practice witchcraft.

Also having that negative karma feature on any political sub amounts to a total ban on all politically incorrect opinions. If most people on a political sub are for candidate A, you will never be allowed to share your support for candidate B. Making it wrongly seem like candidate B has 0% support and candidate A has 100% support.

nefarious,

I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.

I think Goodhart's law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn't require you to make quality contributions.

FaceDeer,
FaceDeer avatar

There are already a lot of userscripts floating around to customize the appearance of kbin, I'm sure it'll be trivial to hide the reputation score if you don't want to see it.

Bear in mind that the Fediverse is inherently transparent. Your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted publicly via ActivityPup, so someone can come up with a way to summarize your reputation score even if your "home" instance isn't showing it to them.

Chozo,
Chozo avatar

I actually prefer having a visible scoring system in place. Things like that can be red flags that indicate whether or not somebody is participating in a discussion in bad faith. If you take a cursory glance through somebody's profile and see that they're constantly stirring up trouble and being a bother to people, you know not to waste your energy dealing with them.

Obviously it's not a perfect solution for that situation, and doesn't apply in all scenarios (trolls can also be good karma farmers, too), but it's an extra indicator that can help determine somebody's true motives in a discussion.

fishos,
fishos avatar

If it does have to return, I'd like it to wipe regularly. Every 3 months or 6 months everyone goes back to zero. Give EVERYONE the same "badge" that just says "so and so was here in year X" or whatever and leave it at that.

Or go back to what forums did and only count post count and word count and turn those into EXP.

shepherd,
shepherd avatar

Wait so when am I supposed to boost? Upvotes sort now, so I should usually upvote and boost when I think something should be at the top?

luna,

Boost when you want a post to be on your profile

UnhappyCamper,
UnhappyCamper avatar

I don't really like this as maybe I just want a comment or post to get more exposure, but don't necessarily want it plastered on my profile page.

harmonea,
harmonea avatar

Lemmy might be more your jam as a home base; Kbin's whole niche seems to be a blend of threaded content with microblog content, and boost(reblog) is a significant part of the latter.

kuontom,
kuontom avatar

Yup, boost and upvote if you want to give a bigger push to a post towards the top. Remember boosts are like retweets - they're public and will show up on your profile in the boosts section.

SpacemanSpiff,
SpacemanSpiff avatar

Unless Ernest changed this too and I missed it, boosts still work with the microblogging portion of the fediverse, such as Mastodon. Upvotes and downvotes only interact with the “threadiverse”.

So my understanding is that boosts are now reflecting on threads as 2 upvotes, whereas on microblog posts they reflect as boosts and as 2 upvotes but only on the threadiverse sites.

(Someone correct me if wrong please!)

NotAPenguin,

Boosts don't count as 2 upvotes, just as two reputation points on your profile page, reputation doesn't do anything.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

Boosts do count as two upvotes when sorting Top or Hot (you can check/prove this by sorting a feed by top, it will not always be in order of boosts if some posts have lots of upvotes and less boosts). This has been the case for weeks now. The recent change just brings reputation in line with this logic.

dismalnow, (edited )
dismalnow avatar

Yet. Unless prior scores get nuked, it's going to cause a lot of confusion when they do for OGs in the fediverse.

Maybe I'll start a new discussion on this - or join one that's already running once I find it - but the best way to use these three scores seems obvious to me, and needs a standard to be established.

Upvotes/boosts/reduces need to do SOMETHING. I posit a simple structure and reasoning:

  • Upvotes increase your "reliability" rating. This can be used to establish trust as a person who commits bytes to a federated server.
  • Downvotes decrease that reliability rating.
  • Boosts are reposts to your federated identity (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) for visibility to your subscribers.
firebat,
firebat avatar

@NotAPenguin

Yes it does. That's literally what Ernest said and I even linked his statement on that in the post. It would behoove you to read it.

NotAPenguin,

I think you've misunderstood what ernest said.

firebat,
firebat avatar

@NotAPenguin Maybe, what is your interpretation of "Hey, boost == 2*upvote. Simple as that ;)"

polygon,
polygon avatar

Boost is doing two things, traditional upvote in Threads, and posting to Microblog. The way I read it is saying that it's two upvotes is kind of a quick way of saying "one click performs two actions and your reputation points reflect both actions". It doesn't logically track that you can upvote a Thread twice, but it makes sense when you consider boost increases visibility in two different places.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

A boost is more like a retweet, anybody who follows you elsewhere in the fediverse will see the thing you boosted in their feed.

An upvote(=a favourite) doesn't get broadcast in the same way. This is why a boost is weighted as a more significant endorsement.

OonTaaKissa,
OonTaaKissa avatar

Upvote = "I like this"
Boost = "I think other people will like this"

genoxidedev1,
genoxidedev1 avatar

Reputation Points have been updated

Damn I used to be barely above 0 reputation points 😂 I do welcome that change 👍

McBinary,
McBinary avatar

It seems that infinite scroll is now working in comments too?! Nice!

PinaAkoda,
PinaAkoda avatar

This might be a really stupid question, but does that mean we can give a post or comment 3 points with a boost and upvote? Or does the boost account for that so a post will only get 2 points at most?

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

Yep you can effectively give a post three upvotes by boosting and upvoting.

blazera,
blazera avatar

this just makes it a 2 step hassle to properly upvote something, and skews everything upward since you can either give something +3 or -1. Scores will reflect popularity more than general quality consensus.

Chozo,
Chozo avatar

Scores will reflect popularity more than general quality consensus.

I think that's just an unavoidable consequence of having a forum that allows for voting like this. Even on Reddit, very few people upvoted/downvoted according to the "official" guidelines (based on whether or not a post was of quality/contributed to the discussion) and instead just upvoted what they thought was funny or downvoted what they disagreed with.

That's a people issue more than it is a UI/UX issue.

blazera,
blazera avatar

Im not talking about any guidelines, just barebones I like this or I dislike this. With this setup most people could dislike something and it still have a very positive score.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

This is an interesting point - controversial posts could rank highly if people keep boosting as flippantly as they have.

The algorithm can always be refined later if needed. The idea at the moment is an upvote is an upvote, then if you really like something and want to republish it onto your own profile you boost it. If people understand that and use it this way it does makes sense that boosts have a greater significance than an upvote.

I think many here don't realise a boost is fediverse equivalent of a retweet.

blazera,
blazera avatar

You can either vote 3 times or 1 time for something, which are you picking? Its not flippant, its how its designed right now.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

...or 2, or -1. But if you boost it becomes part of your profile. It is broadcast to everybody who follows you. It can be seen on your profile indefinitely (...you've boosted some weird stuff!)

blazera,
blazera avatar

I make some weird stuff

Metaright,
Metaright avatar

there is no connection between reputation points and sorting algorithms. It's just info in the profile"

Thank God. Just this factor alone is going to make the platform much better than Reddit.

mrbigmouth502,
mrbigmouth502 avatar

I like the changes that have been made so far. It's neat having a positive reputation score for once. 😅

HeartyBeast,
HeartyBeast avatar

My reputation went from -26 to 2800 - finally I can hold my head up in public :)

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Well, my reputation just went from 80 to 860, so I'm going to consider this a positive change.

Kenraali,
Kenraali avatar

Now if only you had the option to hide boosts.

kaseijin,

Does boosting cost anything? What's to prevent people from just boosting instead of upvoting?

harmonea,
harmonea avatar

Why do you think we need to prevent people from boosting? Boost has more functions than just "super upvote," and a basic understanding of the system will make it clear that you'll be hitting them in different situations.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

Perhaps reply to them and ask about why they boosted something random - talking of which, that John Oliver pic? :-p

harmonea,
harmonea avatar

That pic was, and still is, fucking hilarious. I won't apologize. :D

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

Fair :)
I was mostly just demonstrating that Boosts become part of your profile and thus a much more public endorsement. I should however probably have picked on kaseijin to show this, not as the person who replied.

adonis,
adonis avatar

Boosts count as two Upvotes (link)

It's like he read my mind! I was thinking the same, considering the fact what the boost buttion is actually for

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