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Upvotes/Downvotes and boosts being visible on posts. (kbin.social)

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

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I don't mean the actual numbers. I mean being able to see who has actually upvoted, downvoted, and boosted a post.

I've already received one message from a user after downvoting their post because I felt the content was a little on the fence. This should not be a thing. I should be able to vote on posts without worrying about someone messaging me because they have a problem with how I voted.

In my opinion, this is a bit lacking for the safety and security of members here. (Or people who just want to lurk for that matter.)

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[–] Kichae@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This. Very much this.

There are other ways to sort posts than aggregate difference between arrows. Replace up votes with favourites, or even emoji reacts for fun, and remove downvotes.

They're just not a good tool. They're a crutch from websites that didn't want to invest in moderation and so bet on crowd sourcing.

They ended up with moderators anyway.

[–] Melancholia@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My ideal system would have two things to vote on.. whether you like/agree with a comment and whether you think it contributes to the discussion. So you could upvote an entertaining quippy comment but also vote that it doesn't really contribute anything meaningful, and you could downvote something you disagree with while still indicating it adds to the discussion.

I doubt people would use it correctly, but I think its a nice idea in theory.

[–] shepherd@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hmmm, so on kbin.social we already have that actually! Or we have something close to it.

We have upvotes, downvotes, boosts and reports. Upvotes don't contribute to your reputation right now (apparently that's a bug though, but maybe it's a feature haha). Boosts are supposed to be like a retweet, but I think they're taken into account for sort order too.

So we can already boost meaningful content, and report irrelevant content! Nice! And then for personal takes, we could continue using up/downvotes.

Unfortunately downvotes currently affect reputation, and they're publicly listed, so there's definitely conflict around people unhappy about their negative reputations. I've been fairly liberal with my boosts to try to balance that out lol.

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

So we can already boost meaningful content, and report irrelevant content! Nice! And then for personal takes, we could continue using up/downvotes.

I think that's a great way to think about it, it almost makes me think the comments should stay sorted by the number of boosts

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

I have thought about the reacts a bit since I saw it brought up. I kind of like the idea. Might make the comments look a little....busy? But they're more expressive than voting and sometimes I just wanna tell someone their comment was really insightful.

Biggest downside, people would inherently call for an Angry react, which would lead to the same behavior we already have with the downvotes. As would absolutely any user-handled way to combat spam

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

People don't interpret angry reacts as downvotes on other sites. If that's how Redditors have been conditioned to see something like that, maybe reconditioning is necessary?