If you're here from Reddiit, please remember to use the boost link in the post rather than the Upvote button, as the Upvote is meaningless to a user's reputation.
@NotTheOnlyGamer It's fine for it to do something different I guess but it sounds like the boost functionality is what people would expect for the up arrow. If the up arrow is just like a favorites then that functionality could be a text button as "save" or "favorite". Maybe an icon as a heart or star.
If the issue is trying to separate up votes from likes and down votes from dislikes the arrows might need to be abandoned all together. Or maybe some kind of quality reflecting term/icon used along side likes/dislikes.
Lemmy doesn't currently have a boost button. Boosts are literally Mastodon's version of a retweet button and since kbin is more compatible with mastodon than lemmy is atm, kbin users have one too.
Unfortunately, incorporating Mastodon's system on a standard forum hasn't panned out quite well -- people are WAY more likely to downvote something than they ever are to reblog it, causing perfectly civil users to have a -400 karma balance. The kbin dev has already acknowledged that it's unbalancing things a bit, so hopefully that should be handled when he gets through the 900 other things. Until then, upvotes on Lemmy I assume are normal, but upvotes on kbin's side are literally just for looks.
Welcome, btw. It takes a while to get used to things here, but I hope you aren't finding things too difficult :)
Thank you, Nepenthe. I think I'll create a kbin acct to see what it looks like from that side. I've heard that it has some advantages over Lemmy's interface.
In terms of karma, for Lemmy users there doesn't seem to be a running, total tally the way there is on Reddit. That is-- you can see what karma a user has tallied on individual posts & comments, and you can use that karma to sort stuff on their profile, but otherwise, everyone seems to look the same from a karmic standpoint. (I hope Lord Vishnu isn't too offended)
for Lemmy users there doesn't seem to be a running, total tally the way there is on Reddit.
To be honest with you, I would rather kbin's karma be handled in the same manner that lemmy handles it. I see no reason for it outside of sorting. Communities could lock the ability to post behind a minimum karma like reddit did, but nobody can really pretend bots won't just get around the limit by reposting a single picture of a cat.
I sense by far what having a visible reputation on a user's profile is going to lead to is just a bunch of karma farming. The low-effort reposts, mindlessly repeated one-liners, and constant bitchy one-upmanship are all things I'd be very glad to leave behind me forever. I didn't even realize how bad it had gotten til I left, and now whenever I end up back on reddit for something, the whole thing just makes me tired. I seem to have been a frog, boiling alive in mean little shitposts.
100% agreed. I'd been hoping for a reddit alternative to build an adequate groundswell for quite a long time before this hullabaloo exactly because the level of discussion had degraded so severely. Pretty done with people rehashing the popular responses that they knew would get upvotes the same way they had gotten upvotes the preceding million times they'd been posted whether they were relevant to the topic of the op or not. This platform can only benefit from fostering more substantive discussions.
I don't think there's a reality where some personal tending of what shows up in our feeds isn't necessary to weed out different attitudes/conventions inherent to particular communities, but the more we can avoid a descent into similar behaviors by way of activating the reward center of the brain for frivolous posting the better.
tl;dr - If I never have to read about Brawndo in a post discussing world politics again I will be happier than I probably deserve.
@NotTheOnlyGamer maybe we shouldn’t encourage people to try and farm internet points. It might make so people engage in actual discussion rather than try to be the internet’s funny man.
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think that's the main issue. It's very easy to tap / click the upvote arrow and the UI makes sense based on Reddit. The thing is, it's not having the impact that those users think it's having. Boosting is the equivalent function to what a Reddit user or customer expects an upvote to do. It's not just about farming points, it's that the expected reaction isn't happening for those people trying to give positive reinforcement.
Not sure if I agree. For me, the positive enforcement didn't come from reaching 200k karma or whatever, it came from people visibly enjoying the comment/post. Still does. Knowing I amused five people feels way nicer in the moment than seeing the big number get bigger and fighting to keep it there.
Seeing something I said inadvertently pissed people off feels way worse than general negative karma too, because it's easier to distance yourself from a negative reputation when you don't have the reason for that onscreen in front of you. The number on my profile lacks the immediate context that a post does. Profile karma is just a generic, unexplained judgement of your social worth, which sounds horrendous the more I think about it.
It has to be at least a bit upsetting to glance at the reputation and realize you're somehow deep in the negatives, but that would be a non-issue if it just wasn't visible outside of the comment section.
Seeing something I said inadvertently pissed people off feels way worse than general negative karma
Yeap, I'm totally with you on that. Indeed, IIRC from science studies, the average person's brain is -way- out-proportioned by sensitivity to negativity & threat-response than it is, all purry (like a happy cat) from positive feedback.
It's evidently an artifact from our total history of living in clans & tribes for approximately 300k yrs spent living that kind of live before 'digital, social media' came along. If you follow me.
@NightFantom Probably. KBin has two means of positive reinforcement - upvotes which do nothing whatsoever, and boosts, which are actually equivalent to Reddit upvotes (and are more obfuscated). On the other hand, it has a single negative reinforcement, downvotes, which do have an impact. I don't think that your actions on Lemmy can have any impact whatsoever to a KBin user's rep.
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