PSA: Upvote is not an upvote like you are used to (like Reddit) - "Boost" is the Reddit Upvote
Like the title says, if you want to upvote something on KBin, you should use the Boost link, not the upvote button (Why? Don't know...)
The upvote button doesn't seem to do much, but Boost accomplishes what Reddit's upvote did. So if you're looking to encourage a post, use the Boost link.
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Thanks! I'll upvote this for visibility.
Bruh, you got me laughing hard.
418 upvotes / 3 downvoted = You one funny Person*
I am brand new to KBIN n loving it so far
Thanks to OP I got me answer .. that's the first thing I didn't get;
"What's the diff between n upvote and boost ? "
@HamSwagwich
This is a result of the original design. Kbin, up until just before the peak traffic hit, was using boosts as upvotes and favorites/likes were just below the post/thread (where boost sits now). Lemmy does it the way it is now (likes = upvotes) so Ernest changed it to match Lemmy behavior. But just as he changed it, he hadn’t changed the calculation for reputation to match when the server nearly melted down and he has to spend all his time just trying to keep the site alive by himself.
Respect
I see you’re on a different Kbin instance. Was this intended to be a threaded reply, out of curiosity? Because it shows up as a top-level comment on the post for me.
He using an optional feature that lets you auto populate your reply box with the OPs username.
Yes, but my bigger point is that it’s not threaded as a reply to one of that user’s comments.
Edit: Oops, nevermind. I saw their comments elsewhere down here but didn’t realize they were OP. Just one of the interface things on Kbin that needs improvement.
Edit 2: I need to figure out how to do strikethrough text on here
You can do strikethrough text
~~like this~~I'm viewing this from KBin and I don't see strikethrough.
That's because I put that in a code block with backticks (`), here's what it looks like normally
testingAs a desktop kbin user, there's no strikethrough. Unsure as to why, if kbin is markdown. Strikethrough is considered advanced markdown formatting so I'm guessing kbin didn't include it. Now I'm curious to see how much common markdown is visible on kbin's desktop platform.
Guide for those unfamiliar with markdown, so you can see what I'm doing. ✔ means I can see it on desktop kbin, ❌ means it remains unformatted (formatting characters remain).
Horizontal rule ✔
Testing MD (headings)
bullet points ✔
bold ✔
emphasis ✔
~~strikethrough~~ ❌
escaping *characters* ✔
code (inline)✔How weird. When I do that, it doesn’t seem to work.
testtesting your assertiontestEdit: doesn't seem to render properly on jerboa lemmy client
It looks good on the . 35 Jerboa
Ideas for Edit 3: crate the Reddit avatar and start anew. 🥹
the dev of kbin will be changing this. so up/downvotes are what affect your reputation. It's just not a priority right now
Do we know if there have been any releases since the influx of users? Or are they just focusing on backend stuff still?
There's still a lot of long hanging fruit *COUGHcollapsingthreads that would be great to have addressed sooner rather than later.
It's just one guy. We were a bit worried if he was even sleeping when the first big wave hit and he kept everything up by cloudflare and prayer.
Surely @ernest has some help at this point? Needs to start delegating or finding trusted maintainers if not.
Yeah there are a bunch of us in the dev chat now. Some of us have set up our additional kbin instances such as myself. I’m still looking through the code and getting up to speed but hope to contribute to the main code base soon. (Right now I’m experimenting with some features I wrote on my instance)
So yes, it’s mainly been Ernest up until this point but he is starting to get additional support from the community :)
Thanks for joining! Excited to see the site grow.
Thank you! I’m excited to see the site grow as well. We seem to be building a nice place to hangout and have good discussions unlike the site that shall not be named.
(Also love your username)
Yes, there is a very strong team there now, and I will gradually delegate responsibility in certain areas. I need to focus on my own milestones. However, I want to do it slowly because there are many pitfalls here that are a consequence of kbin being a side project. But the organization on Matrix was amazing, and I didn't even lift a finger for it.
@BedSharkPal @Upvotes_Kills_Birds
Great to hear!
There's several of us now with kbin installed locally and a decent dev chat channel that's pretty busy. I think so the end it's still him physically marking PRs as approved and merging it in / deploying, but at least there's a few contributors now :)
There have been fixes submitted by volunteers, but I don't think they've been reviewed and approved. And I don't think there have been any new releases.
Hopefully things pick up speed now that Ernest has a server admin to look after things here
Yeah, there's a PR for collapsing threads, but I don't know when it will come to release.
I made a userscript that allows you to collapse comments, that should help you out until it's added to the site officially
You can have a look here to see a test instance with some of the things that are coming, Ernest (the admin) has been merging in a range of tickets including bug fixes, UI improvements and other bits.
There seems to be an ever growing backlog of feature requests and bug fixes in the issues list but a fair bit is getting sorted out behind the scenes.
I'm mostly focused on UI/UX for mobile.
So if up/down votes will be fixed in the future, what would boost mean at that point?
I really don't know which is which and what does what, so I just click them both
upvote = does nothing (for now) boost = upvote (affects reputation points)
So sometime in the future an upvote will be used to score the post and get it on the "frontpage", and a Boost is just like a save feature to save posts to my microblog?
i wouldnt call boost a save feature per say, but since we arent on mastodon it pretty much looks like one so i guess you can call it that lol. yes, eventually the reputation will be fixed and upvotes will affect it as it should, its just not a priority for now
*per se
I'm sorry
There's nothing wrong with being a little bit pedantic as long as you aren't an ass about it.
oh well, i was understood lol
As someone from Lemmy land this confuses me.
Have an upvote!
I think it confuses everyone. I have no idea why these two things exist in KBin. It's a complete mystery the thought process that went into it.
Although the name "boost" is a little odd. kbin is more than than just a link aggregator. kbin is also a semi-blogging platform (View the microblog feed rather than threads) that interacts with Mastodon. If you boost something, it is the same as reblogging (re-tweeting) a post and generates a reblog post on Mastodon. The developer is going to change it to where the up and downvote impacts reputation rather than the current boost and downvote button. A technical oversight but they acknowledge this and plan on changing it in the future however internet points is not really a priority so no one knows when the change will roll out.
This finally made it make sense for me. Thank you
This is the answer.
That’s how I’ve been using the buttons.
Boost should allow people who subscribe to you but not the magazine see that post in their feed.
This is a perfectly succinct way of putting it.
Because kbin can interface with content from mastodon AND Lemmy.
The boost is for mastodon/microblogs, the upvote is for Lemmy/threadiverse.
Upvotes are likes for mastodon but afaik they don't do anything in mastodon except make you feel good that people liked your post.
boost is "retweet" or "reshare". upvote is 'like'.
My understanding is your "subscribed" feed shows stuff from people you follow as well as the magazines you're subscribed to. Mastodon users' posts typically end up in the microblog section which can be found here. whereas kbin/lemmy users often posts threads which can be found here. It's mixed in with the magazines you subscribe to. I don't think there's a way to just get the followed users without the magazines you're subscribed to.
Oh wow, I did not even know about the microblog section. Thanks!
As I understand it, it’s a feature that is inherited from the underlying ActivityPub protocol which is designed to support all kinds of social network architectures.
If you use Mastodon, their usage makes a lot sense. A ‘favourite’ (upvote on Kbin) is a private thumbs-up to the poster - a pat on the back that has no algorithmic importance.
A Boost is more like a Retweet. Boosting something makes it show up in your followers’ timeline. I guess if you follow a person on kbin, Boosts will do that too and boosted stuff will show on your subscribed home page.
Not crazy about the design. An upvote should be an upvote. If the upvote is useless, why is it even there?
It'll be changed soon™, so upvotes will boost reputation.
Read some of the other comments. It doesn’t sound like you’ve been following much of the chatter about the site very closely.
You should update your post to clarify that what you said isn't true.
Upvotes are upvotes, boost is like retweet.
The reputation calculation just haven't been updated yet.
Right, so boost behaves like Reddit upvote at the moment. So the title of the post is accurate still.
No it does not.
Boost behaves like a retweet and upvotes like upvotes.
The reputation calculation just haven't been updated yet, that doesn't mean an upvote isn't an upvote.
Upvotes are what shows as upvotes because that's what they are.
Reputation is just something on your profile page that's currently wrong.
Your post is spreading a misunderstanding, there's already been other confused people posting.
And if everyone just reads and listens to OP they'll all be doing it wrong when it gets fixed, all because you aren't happy that your "reputation" score isn't changing. The software is scarcely a month old folks, and until a week ago was the work of one guy. People need to relax a bit.
Boosts are retweets, upvotes are favorites. So upvoting means you "like" that content, and boosting is kinda like sharing it to your followers.
Importantly, boosts republish posts and comments. This is meaningful because groups work by basically boosting anything that mentions it, or which is in reply to something that mentions it. And posts silently mention the group.
Why is this important? Well, if you're the first person on your instance to follow someone on another one, you don't see anything published by that person earlier than that. But if that person regularly boosts older posts, you'll get to see them.
So boosting posts and comments triggers the group to re-boost it, sending it out to servers that started following after the original publish time.
Basically, boosting is how we make sure new users on remote sites see older content.
I click ALL the buttons and nobody can stop me!
Reported! But it's nothing personal :)
But boosts don’t do anything on places that don’t implement like here on Lemmy. …no?
A boost is like a retweet, from my understanding - so must be a basic bit of functionality built into ActivityPub, I’d guess.
Yep. Though activitypub calls it something else as well. It's renames all the way down
Yeah seems redundant.
Do upvotes/boosts and downvotes pass from one instance to another? I assume not. So if I upvote a post from lemmy.world that's hosted on kbin.social...what happens? It only affects lemmy.world?
The votes are federated but peeps post from time to time that they arent perfectly synced.
been wondering about comments too... but I guess those are supposed to somehow sync across all instances. otherwise how am I replying to you from Lemmy?
There is no boost on Lemmy instances, though
What happens when a kbin user boosts my Lemmy post? What happens when I upvote their post? So many questions
Every time you boost a lemmy post, an angel gets its wings! And a demon gets its pitchfork. And a trans person gets their gender validated. And a nazi gets punched in the face!
I boosted you from kbin, and I have a follower on mastodon.world.
Therefore you have a toot federated to mastodon.world : https://mastodon.world/@[email protected]/110596451235144258
If I understand correctly, when a Kbin user boosts a Lemmy post, it will work like an upvote, bringing it up. But it wouldn't affect anything for Lemmy users. But when a Lemmy user upvotes a post from a Kbin user, it will just be shown as an upvote but not effect reputation or anything, but will upvote it for lemmy users.
I do wish there was a bit more privacy involved with boosting though, as of right now anyone can see what I boost.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but just in case, that's the point of a boost. You're boosting its noticeability. It's not supposed to be private
Boost as a “shout out” being public is alright. I guess for us Reddit folks it’s like a cross post to our own u/sub that followers could see.
Upvote/downvote, though, should be private. Not sure if that’s ever truly possible though because by the nature of the fediverse it has to be replicated across to other instances and so everything is “open” as I understand it.
It may not be easily visible in the UI but it’s there in the data.
So I try to think of everything here like it’s a postcard not a letter.
Any mail carrier who sees it (and makes a copy) can see it all.
for me, the main selling point of kbin over lemmy was the transparency in user interactions on here. the last straw on the camel's back over at lemmy for me was seeing blatant vote manipulation hiding behind the end-user anonymity; kept an eye on some accounts that would instantly always get the same number of upvotes, dependent on the specific account, less than 3-5 seconds after posting. it was always some single-digit amount (I assume to not get flagged by the system), but that's all it takes to signal others to feel safer upvoting it.
the same can be done likewise to bury others' content that they can view as competition to what they want seen, multiple early downvotes can act as a subconscious deterrent to others
But what are upvotes and downvotes? I would have assumed upvote is fave/star. Is downvote an emoji react?
I believe you are correct about upvotes. To my knowledge, downvotes don’t federate at all (ActivityPub may not support them, for all I know), so what they do here is merely affect reputation points.
Just caught my attention with the wording - upvote being "favourite" and downvote called "reduce" (whatever that means)
I believe the idea with “reduce” is the opposite of “boost”.
"Hide this post from people!" :')
Oh interesting, so are downvote counts only reflective of what my individual server has received? I assumed they at least federated between kbin and Lemmy even if the rest of fedi didn't have a way to understand them.
It’s possible, but again don’t take my word for it. I haven’t really begun to dive into the code just yet.
Why doesn't Kbin have the [+] and [-] buttons for collapsing or opening comment threads? Or, if it does, where can I find that setting?
It's coming. There is already a fix someone created that is waiting to be reviewed and merged into the site.
In my understanding, boost is retweet and upvote is upvote. So upvote is the Reddit upvote but it doesn't change your reputation?
Well played.
Took me a moment to figure out what you were even talking about. The boost button is translated as "upvoto" in Portuguese, so that doesn't help...
Maybe it should be something like "promover" (promote).
https://youtube.com/shorts/wx5DO_jceJc?si=lGWBdHW7tPa68Wxu
Glad to hear, I had no idea about this.