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Request: Remove ability to 'boost' your own comments and threads (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by uphillbothways@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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The ability to 'boost' your own comments/threads has been used by a very small number of users in a way that seriously degrades conversation on the platform. These users constantly move their own contributions to the top of the conversation without regard to their value. If allowed to continue it will likely become standard for everyone to do the same and the value of the 'boost' feature will be lessened.

I can't see a downside to removing the ability to do so, and it seems like it would be very easy to implement. Though, I am open to discussion on the topic.

Thank you. (And, once again, I apologize if there is a thread about this topic already. I searched, but didn't see one.)

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[–] PugJesus@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Boosting threads is useful in that it helps shift a post from 'new' (which most people don't check) to 'hot' (which is the default feed for most people). Posts from small communities often die with 0 upvotes and 0 downvotes without that.

Just did a little unscientific test. Made a post in a community that usually gets 20+ upvotes within an hour. No self-boost puts it at 1 upvote after an hour.

[–] cacheson@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's because of a bug in the hot sorting. It was working fine for a while, and then broke. Upvoting your own post also fixes it. We should probably have our posts self-upvoted by default anyway, like on reddit and lemmy.

[–] Pamasich@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We should probably have our posts self-upvoted by default anyway, like on reddit and lemmy.

Well, Lemmy doesn't either. It pretends to exactly so you don't (I assume that's the reasoning). It doesn't actually add an upvote in your name and so it's also not counted as upvoted by you by other platforms. I can only guess it's trying to prevent people from adding an upvote by making them think the platform already did it for them.

Just check Lemmy posts on kbin (considering voting is public). How many of them have the creator as one of the upvoters? New posts with 1 upvote on Lemmy have 0 on kbin.

Discovered this a few weeks ago while testing some federation stuff.

[–] cacheson@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, fair point. Either way, it doesn't make sense for it to be optional.