Spyke

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Upvotes/Downvotes and boosts being visible on posts.

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I used to be against removing the downvote button, but honestly, it's used a weapon more than anything else. It's also used as "I disagree with this person" instead of an indicator of the value or veracity of a given post, which is not the intent. As such, I've now come around to the position that removing downvotes is the way to go.

Upvoting if you like a post, or do nothing if you don't is the correct answer I think.

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Lemmy.world is now the #1 lemmy instance with 37k users!

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I don't know if it's temporary, but you can't post from Lemmy.world to Kbin, or even see any federated content from KBin. Also, anything I post from KBin doesn't show up on Lemmy.world.

Also, if you go to Lemmy.world and view this thread, there's 174 comments and counting. They aren't showing up here. Something is wrong with Lemmy.world federation.

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Kbin upvote vs Lemmy upvvote

This explanation and suggestions from @poVoq was the absolute best I've seen and I agree with nearly all of it.

The stated rationale for up and down-votes in Lemmy is to crowd-source content curation as an alternative to what other social media platforms do with their algorithms. A secondary goal is to crowd-source a sort of light moderation of comments by partially sorting comments threads after votes. This is similar to how it works in Reddit and HN etc.

While both sounds good on paper, in my experience neither works on Lemmy. I think this is mainly because the number of votes and comments (aka the number of active participants) is just too low on 95% of the posts for it to result in a meaningful content curation signal. But to make it worse, there are some notorious heavy users that abuse the system, which is easy to do as a few down-votes are usually sufficient.

I think the Lemmy devs still hope that at some point there will be sufficient scale for their vote curation system to work, but I started to think that a design that only works at a certain scale is fundamentally flawed in a federated context.

For Kbin I think it is even less likely to work, as the decision to use boosts as upvotes will make people hesitant to up-vote. While I agree that boosts make certain sense to use for this, I also know that people un-follow accounts that do too much boosting as it results in it occupying their entire home-feed. For me a boost is a stronger signal than a star/favorite and thus should be used more seldomly.

However, I still think using boosts as upvotes is not necessarily a bad idea, but it IMHO requires to get away from the up/down vote idea of Lemmy where it is encouraged to vote as much as possible (and even that isn't at a sufficient scale for the idea to work in Lemmy).

My suggestion is to lean into the idea to use boosts as up-votes and very explicitly use the "double-arrow" boost icon where currently the up-vote button is and do away with the down-vote there all together. That will integrate better with the rest of the fediverse and not lead to people being confused that others unfollow them over boost spam. You can still count the number of boosts to do some basic "hot" sorting, but this will work better with small communities that do not have sufficient scale.

You can still add a "dislike" or so button where currently the "comments, favorites, more" buttons are, but that should be an optional thing and not federate, or only federate in the local bubble (a concept of Akkoma for forming closer relations of a small number of instances).

Edit: for comments I would forget about votes all together, as on Lemmy vote abuse is even more common in the comments. Boosting comments out of context is often a bit jarring in the fediverse anyways, so the option to boost them should be probably de-emphasized.

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Lemmy.world is now the #1 lemmy instance with 37k users!

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I've been investigating this more. It seems to be a problem with Kbin.social... I can view anything on lemmy instances from Kbin, but I can't view anything on Kbin from lemmy instances. I can't search my own name, I can't search Kbin.social communities from Lemmy (tried lemmy.world and beehaw.org) ... so I don't know what to do. This problem basically kills kbin.social for me if it won't federate properly.

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Kbin account support?

Some Lemmy instances don't work right with federation, whereas KBin does. For example, I can see all of lemmy.worlds communities from KBin, but I can't see any KBin communities from lemmy.world.

Also, I use my desktop a lot, so I use the web interface, and the Lemmy interface is absolutely awful compared to KBin. Sync should really be focusing on KBin first and Lemmy second, since KBin is the more stable, usable fediverse Reddit alternative right now.

EDIT ... it appears that it's KBin that's actually the problem, unfortunately. The Lemmy instances are federating and Kbin is being slow (or not) updating. I've tried two different Lemmy instances and it's not seeing KBin content yesterday. Today it's seeing some of it, but most of the lemme origin content is not showing up on KBin (This thread is an example) ... so ... damn.

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"Antiwoke" magazin on kbin.social posting bullshit like "how to end Wokeness" and "Time to reject the extrem trans lobby harming our society" How to report ? he is the moderator of that magazin.

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Ive decided not to block him so I can follow him around annoying him and downvoting everything he says

Perfect example of why voting should be public!

Blocking him is the right answer, it's the right thing to do and solves the problem of him presenting posts you don't want to see.