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?
When it comes to /kbin as a platform, the federation of downvotes will certainly work and will be configurable per instance. Today, I started the initial work on implementing new ActivityPub services from scratch. This is a good time to start a discussion on how it should work on kbin.social - to your points, I would also add:
- Downvote federation only applies to remote threads from other instances, without affecting local therads
Thanks for the response, Ernest!
This is a good time to start a discussion on how it should work on kbin.social
A while back, I made a thread on /m/AskKbin about this. While it’s not solely kbin.social users, there’s still a lot of good input, and you could use KES to sort through those who are and aren’t on the instance if you want. My two cents are that it’s important for downvotes to exist, be federated, and be shown separately so that (A) people can easily express that they feel something doesn’t helpfully contribute to the discussion and (B) similar expressions from other instances aren’t drowned out.
Downvote federation only applies to remote threads from other instances, without affecting local threads
To be clear, what exactly do you mean by this? Does this mean that downvote federation is one-way (i.e., that downvotes federate from Kbin instances but not to Kbin instances)?
EDIT: Fixed quote formatting.
I understand what you are saying here, and I have flip-flopped on the issue myself. At the moment I personally am a fan of the limited downvote federation because I do think it acts as a hivemind barrier; to use reddit as an example, as it got bigger the downvote was used as a means to disagree without adding any value to the discussion or to simply silence a dissenting point of view.
That is not to say there were not times when a downvote was warranted - hateful comments, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry are all more than deserving of a downvote. There are also bots and general off-topic posts & comments that may warrant a downvote.
Overall though, I think the problem is how the downvote was used (on Reddit, at least) was not conducive to discussion. However, due to the fact that upvotes and downvotes are public on kbin it is possible that behavior could change, but then that could create problems with other instances where none of that information is public to begin with. (Nobody wants to have a crazy person come after them over a downvote.)
Right now, the fediverse is pretty small and Kbin is actually the most welcoming instance I have found so far. I am not sure if the lack of downvote federation has anything to do with this, but so far I actually like it. Maybe once kbin and the expanded fediverse grows larger my opinion will change, but right now I feel like it’s helping to make it more hospitable than reddit.
Edit: grammar and clarity
A key difference here is we can see who downvoted which I think makes people more cautious to downvote. I guess Lemmy users aren’t used to that however (but it might change their behaviour when they realise we can see!)
Right! I sometimes wonder if that could not lead to a schism in the future; many, many people on lemmy value their complete anonymity and they could see kbin exposing their upvotes and downvotes as a violation of that. (Not saying that people on kbin don’t, but I think we act knowing that people can see who upvoted/favorited or downvoted/reduced a post.)
I can say that public voting has definitely changed my use of the downvote; I was much more trigger happy with it on reddit whereas I don’t think I have used it at all since I joined kbin. Lemmy users seem to use it the same way Redditors do, largely because voting isn’t public on their end.
Ill be honest, voting being public is a big deterrent from kbin for me, after having experiences in the past of having people harass me on the assumption that I had downvoted their content.
The risk of being targeted for harassment over a downvote basically cements kbin as an unusable platform for me.
E: And, on thinking about it? It also has me doubting the quality of kbin sourced content. Downvotes on reddit style forums, which this is, work as a community driven content filter. Actively discouraging the use of that filter means higher quality posts are harder to discern. And sifting through more chaff per good post is not appealing.
I see where you’re coming from, but this to me seems more like a property of the fediverse than an issue with Kbin in particular. Right now, anyone can make an instance and choose to show downvotes. Someone could make their own instance, gather downvotes federated from other instances, and make a list of who’s downvoted who. Being on an instance that doesn’t show downvotes doesn’t hide your downvotes from everyone — just you and others on instances that don’t show them.
On this end, I feel that Kbin instances are just being transparent about the publicity of your votes. If anyone can see your downvotes just by looking at an instance that shows them, I think it’s important that people are aware of that. Showing public votes is sort of telling you, “Hey, people can see how you voted on the fediverse,” and that’s preferable to pretending that nobody can see them.
That just drives me to use instances that dont federate with instances who show that information.
Like. Lets apply that logic elsewhere. I could make an instance that makes your ip address public, because that information is also available. Could stick it next to your username.
Would you use that service? Or do you prefer using an instance who keeps the information they can access private?
