Why am I negative in my reputation? I have not made any posts of comments that are negative (accept for maybe a small one or two but it would have been like 4 to 6 or something). Why am I -46 when I have a highly upvoted thread?
I have -2 even though I have plenty of upvotes. I am aware now that downvotes give you negative rep but upvotes don't give you positive. I have no idea if that's being worked on or not but the system is definitely a little confusing, especially for those of us who came from Reddit.
So until... Friday, I think? Thursday? There was a difference between Kbin and Lemmy. Kbin used "boosts" for upvotes and "reduces" for downvotes, but Lemmy used "Favorites" for upvotes instead.
Kbin literally flipped the switch right before Reddit started coming over here en masse to follow Lemmy's lead and have it be favorites/reduces instead.
The issue is that the reputation code doesn't seem to have been updated (probably because... y'know, the website exploded). So the reputation displayed on your profile counts "boosts" as upvotes still. IIRC sorting algorithms like "Hot" still use boosts instead of favorites too.
So I'm giving you a boost right now - which should give a +1 to your reputation.
This is just a visual bug for now, though, so it'll probably be fixed when things die down. This site has only been live for a month or so, so there's still bugs here and there.
Coming from Mastodon - a boost is important- it basically retweets the content to all your followers. A favourite is just a message to the poster that you think their content is cool - they get a notification you favourited it - but that’s alll.
In kbin where people tend to follow topics more than people, I’m not entirely sure what the full ramification of a boost are outside of telling your followers.
On that last part - I believe an intent for kbin is to be a bridge to the fediverse in general, including Mastodon. So both topics AND people would potentially be followed, and used for that reason.
Yes, although I'm guessing upvotes here (or "favourites" at the moment) will do the same eventually. They're brand new and don't seem 100% implemented yet.
Take a moment to really drink in that last sentence.
Some dude named Ernest is just tooling around with a social media platform, trying things out, getting the hang of things, just posting into the nothingness for less than a month to test code. Meanwhile, the CEO of a social media conglomerate who doesn't even know who you are opens the lid on Schrodinger's "ideas box" (don't know if it's a good idea or bad idea until you look inside!) and out of nowhere, your little tiny corner of the internet goes from having like 50 people to 250k in a week.
If I'm not mistaken the polish language instances have been up and running longer, kbin.social is just the first internationally oriented one. But still, it's early development, and it's crazy that the only real problem seems to have been server capacity. Hats off.
All hail Ernest! He's probably scared stupid right now (I'm so sorry Ernest. I have a name irl that gets made fun of also). But yeah jokes aside buy that man a coffee, donate, help him out. He's living in the game changer world right now
For the benefit of anybody who doesn't get this reference, Ernest is the name of a character from a series of American commercials, a children's TV show and then a number of films. One of those films is called Ernest Scared Stupid, which is the joke here.
The entire Ernest franchise is kind of a uniquely American phenomenon; they're not particularly well-known outside of North America. I doubt kbin's Ernest is compared or contrasted with TV's Ernest often at all in Poland.
Does kbin really have 250k users? Do you have a source? I'm curious, but that'd be great if true.
I'm guessing this is more like 250k unique IPs over a day that viewed, and not 250k registered users which I'm guessing is more like 15k or something. Either way, that'd be more than I expected which is good.
kbin had about 165k "visits" yesterday. From here. I'm not quite clear what that means but I'm guessing it's either a site load, or some group of accesses from the same IP (i.e. if someone accessed the site for a few minutes, then went quite for an hour, then accessed again, that's a couple "visits"). But I'm 100% guessing.
kbin has about 25k users of its own at the moment. From here
The fediverse has about 130k users total. I'm not sure if that includes Mastodon, but I think it might.
Edit2: Oh my am I wrong about Mastodon being included. They've added more than 130k users just in the last WEEK. There's over 12m accounts at the moment (according to this) which is fantastic.
I'm not sure I particularly like that but I guess that's how it functions so far. Strangely, I still have my reddit account and checking it; I had new "followers" which I never got before. I'm certain they are bots trying to prop it up during this time. It's all very weird.
This is a helpful explanation. Thank you!
I remember you could follow users on Reddit as well, but I never really knew of any reason to do it. It seems like "boosting" might actually give some agency to that, and maybe I should just start boosting stuff I find particularly interesting.
It's mainly a feature of other ActivityPub platforms (it's the equivalent of a retweet on mastodon) so I'm sure it's partially there for cross-compatability between them.
Of note is that kbin is also connected to the microblogging (think Twitter, Tumblr) side of the fediverse where the "repost content you like to your page" paradigm is more intuitive.
I don't think it makes sense that the down arrow counts towards negative reputation but the up arrow does not count towards positive reputation. Either only have positive reputation linked to boosts or have negative and positive linked to the arrows on comments and threads.
It's not intended behavior, it just isn't getting fixed yet because ernest is still trying to fix the stability issues, which is a much higher priority. In the meantime, consider buying ernest a coffee, he could really use it. The link for that is here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
Most people won't even notice I think. Until that user pointed it out I didn't, and I know about the symbolism too.
I would wait for a while for things to settle down here and then ask ernest if it is possible to change usernames. The progress report he posted today says account deletions are stuck right now and needs manual attention, so I wouldn't delete my account just now, to save the guy some work.
No, upvotes used to be boosts but they switched them recently and haven't updated the reputation to reflect that (probably because the servers were on fire)
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