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What's the plan for downvote federation? (kbin.social)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Right now, downvotes (reduces) don't federate to (and from?) Kbin instances. This lack of federation makes the downvote counter really inaccurate—a comment that looks like it's +10 might be -15 when you look at it from lemmy.world.

This leaves me with a few questions:

Is downvote federation going to be implemented?
If so, is it a priority or something that'll happen much further down the line?
If not, will downvoting be removed?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's not really a culture I want to be fostered here on kbin.social. Kbin instances are part of the wider fediverse, and there's nothing about someone on kbin.social that makes their vote more important than someone else's vote. If Kbin had a reaction system (like I mentioned in another comment) instead of downvotes, then not federating downvotes would make more sense, as specific "this is spam" or "this doesn't contribute to the discussion" reactions are more useful than just a down arrow. But the system we have right now is extremely unintuitive to new users and promotes a culture of "Eh, downvotes from people on other instances don't really matter. What's important is what people who are arbitrarily on my instance think."

If you really want to know which votes are local and which ones aren't, it'd be much better to either

have an indicator next to each user in the activity tab showing whether they're local or not, like what KES does with threads & comments, or
have something you can click that lists the numbers of local votes and remote votes separately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

people who are arbitrarily on my instance

I don't think instance membership is all that arbitrary. I'm on kbin.social not hexbear or beehaw or lemmy.world for good reason, and it's not only because kbin is technically better.

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

It definitely is to some extent, and voting culture isn't a huge part of why people go to kbin.social. Kbin.social is the main Kbin instance. If someone prefers the Kbin's UI to Lemmy's or wants to have microblog support, many will just default to kbin.social. I came here because I thought Lemmy looked ugly and Kbin looked really nice.

When you're introducing the fediverse to people, a lot of people are just going to go to the default instance, and it's honestly good advice to tell people to just do that to start out (lest they turn away from the fediverse entirely due to not being able to make a choice). Voting culture has nothing to do with that. Just because someone's on lemmy.world doesn't mean their downvotes are worth less than ours, and just because someone's on kbin.social doesn't mean they don't just hand out downvotes in order to disagree.