this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
743 points (98.4% liked)

/kbin meta

639 readers
1 users here now

Magazine dedicated to discussions about the kbin itself. Provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics. ---- * Roadmap 2023 * m/kbinDevlog * m/kbinDesign

founded 1 year ago
 

Like the title says, if you want to upvote something on KBin, you should use the Boost link, not the upvote button (Why? Don't know...)

The upvote button doesn't seem to do much, but Boost accomplishes what Reddit's upvote did. So if you're looking to encourage a post, use the Boost link.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] KuchiKopi 446 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks! I'll upvote this for visibility.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Bruh, you got me laughing hard.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 214 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@HamSwagwich

This is a result of the original design. Kbin, up until just before the peak traffic hit, was using boosts as upvotes and favorites/likes were just below the post/thread (where boost sits now). Lemmy does it the way it is now (likes = upvotes) so Ernest changed it to match Lemmy behavior. But just as he changed it, he hadn’t changed the calculation for reputation to match when the server nearly melted down and he has to spend all his time just trying to keep the site alive by himself.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see you’re on a different Kbin instance. Was this intended to be a threaded reply, out of curiosity? Because it shows up as a top-level comment on the post for me.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He using an optional feature that lets you auto populate your reply box with the OPs username.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yes, but my bigger point is that it’s not threaded as a reply to one of that user’s comments.

Edit: Oops, nevermind. I saw their comments elsewhere down here but didn’t realize they were OP. Just one of the interface things on Kbin that needs improvement.

Edit 2: I need to figure out how to do strikethrough text on here

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

You can do strikethrough text ~~like this~~

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm viewing this from KBin and I don't see strikethrough.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's because I put that in a code block with backticks (`), here's what it looks like normally ~~testing~~

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

As a desktop kbin user, there's no strikethrough. Unsure as to why, if kbin is markdown. Strikethrough is considered advanced markdown formatting so I'm guessing kbin didn't include it. Now I'm curious to see how much common markdown is visible on kbin's desktop platform.

Guide for those unfamiliar with markdown, so you can see what I'm doing. ✔ means I can see it on desktop kbin, ❌ means it remains unformatted (formatting characters remain).


Horizontal rule ✔

Testing MD (headings)

  • bullet points ✔

    • sub bullets (no tab on kbin; use 4 spaces) ✔
  • bold

  • emphasis

  • ~~strikethrough~~ ❌

  • escaping *characters* ✔

  • code (inline)

quote ✔

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I'm using kbin.social on desktop and it shows up fine for me, not sure what's going on on your instance

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 154 points 1 year ago (2 children)

the dev of kbin will be changing this. so up/downvotes are what affect your reputation. It's just not a priority right now

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Do we know if there have been any releases since the influx of users? Or are they just focusing on backend stuff still?

There's still a lot of long hanging fruit *COUGHcollapsingthreads that would be great to have addressed sooner rather than later.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (1 children)

they

It's just one guy. We were a bit worried if he was even sleeping when the first big wave hit and he kept everything up by cloudflare and prayer.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Surely @ernest has some help at this point? Needs to start delegating or finding trusted maintainers if not.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah there are a bunch of us in the dev chat now. Some of us have set up our additional kbin instances such as myself. I’m still looking through the code and getting up to speed but hope to contribute to the main code base soon. (Right now I’m experimenting with some features I wrote on my instance)

So yes, it’s mainly been Ernest up until this point but he is starting to get additional support from the community :)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for joining! Excited to see the site grow.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you! I’m excited to see the site grow as well. We seem to be building a nice place to hangout and have good discussions unlike the site that shall not be named.

(Also love your username)

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yes, there is a very strong team there now, and I will gradually delegate responsibility in certain areas. I need to focus on my own milestones. However, I want to do it slowly because there are many pitfalls here that are a consequence of kbin being a side project. But the organization on Matrix was amazing, and I didn't even lift a finger for it.

@BedSharkPal @Upvotes_Kills_Birds

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Not bad for a 'side project', not bad at all!

I'm very much enjoying your side project, and we all appreciate all the effort you've put in as we've stressed it to (and no doubt beyond!) It's design limits.

I also appreciate the way you pop up and contribute to random threads!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Your level of engagement with the community is absolutely spectacular. I'm glad to have found myself a cozy little Internet space and wish you the best of luck with this one hell of a side project!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Great to hear!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There have been fixes submitted by volunteers, but I don't think they've been reviewed and approved. And I don't think there have been any new releases.

Hopefully things pick up speed now that Ernest has a server admin to look after things here

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I made a userscript that allows you to collapse comments, that should help you out until it's added to the site officially

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really don't know which is which and what does what, so I just click them both

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

upvote = does nothing (for now) boost = upvote (affects reputation points)

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As someone from Lemmy land this confuses me.

Have an upvote!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think it confuses everyone. I have no idea why these two things exist in KBin. It's a complete mystery the thought process that went into it.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Although the name "boost" is a little odd. kbin is more than than just a link aggregator. kbin is also a semi-blogging platform (View the microblog feed rather than threads) that interacts with Mastodon. If you boost something, it is the same as reblogging (re-tweeting) a post and generates a reblog post on Mastodon. The developer is going to change it to where the up and downvote impacts reputation rather than the current boost and downvote button. A technical oversight but they acknowledge this and plan on changing it in the future however internet points is not really a priority so no one knows when the change will roll out.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

This finally made it make sense for me. Thank you

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because kbin can interface with content from mastodon AND Lemmy.

The boost is for mastodon/microblogs, the upvote is for Lemmy/threadiverse.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You should update your post to clarify that what you said isn't true.

Upvotes are upvotes, boost is like retweet.

The reputation calculation just haven't been updated yet.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not crazy about the design. An upvote should be an upvote. If the upvote is useless, why is it even there?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

It'll be changed soon™, so upvotes will boost reputation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Read some of the other comments. It doesn’t sound like you’ve been following much of the chatter about the site very closely.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Boosts are retweets, upvotes are favorites. So upvoting means you "like" that content, and boosting is kinda like sharing it to your followers.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Importantly, boosts republish posts and comments. This is meaningful because groups work by basically boosting anything that mentions it, or which is in reply to something that mentions it. And posts silently mention the group.

Why is this important? Well, if you're the first person on your instance to follow someone on another one, you don't see anything published by that person earlier than that. But if that person regularly boosts older posts, you'll get to see them.

So boosting posts and comments triggers the group to re-boost it, sending it out to servers that started following after the original publish time.

Basically, boosting is how we make sure new users on remote sites see older content.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I click ALL the buttons and nobody can stop me!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ndr 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But boosts don’t do anything on places that don’t implement like here on Lemmy. …no?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do upvotes/boosts and downvotes pass from one instance to another? I assume not. So if I upvote a post from lemmy.world that's hosted on kbin.social...what happens? It only affects lemmy.world?

[–] Dick_Justice 7 points 1 year ago

The votes are federated but peeps post from time to time that they arent perfectly synced.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Limeey 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is no boost on Lemmy instances, though

[–] CylonBunny 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

What happens when a kbin user boosts my Lemmy post? What happens when I upvote their post? So many questions

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I do wish there was a bit more privacy involved with boosting though, as of right now anyone can see what I boost.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but just in case, that's the point of a boost. You're boosting its noticeability. It's not supposed to be private

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Boost as a “shout out” being public is alright. I guess for us Reddit folks it’s like a cross post to our own u/sub that followers could see.

Upvote/downvote, though, should be private. Not sure if that’s ever truly possible though because by the nature of the fediverse it has to be replicated across to other instances and so everything is “open” as I understand it.

It may not be easily visible in the UI but it’s there in the data.

So I try to think of everything here like it’s a postcard not a letter.

Any mail carrier who sees it (and makes a copy) can see it all.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›