I mean that’s a cool feature Reddit didn’t have. There are so many tech savvy people here yet I feel the boost button is mostly ignored even though it can be so much more powerful in how it changes the exposure of a link/comment.
If I can’t see the actual amount of boosts due to some fuckery with being on kbin instead Lemmy or whatever lmk.
Edit because I immediately got plenty of confused comments. I enter the lemmyverse through kbin and this federation offers to not just upvote but boost a comment as well. For me this means I can give a comment more exposure.
But I’m really not good with computers plz to halp. There’s a very good chance that I entirely misunderstood what I’m clicking on all the time.
Edit 2: I just wanted to let everyone know that this post was boosted eight times 48 minutes after posting which is a lot. Kbin represent!
It doesn’t exist here on Lemmy.
what’s the boost button
I edited my post to explain my experience with the UI I have.
The Lemmy UI that I’m looking at does not have a “boost button”.
same here
I edited my post to explain my experience with the UI I have.
Nobody knows what the damn boost button actually does. Upvote’s nice and simple.
TIL boost exists.
Now i have a question - why have two different systems of showing that you like the content? Why do we need boost AND upvote?
For me it’s about the difference between what I like and what I think people should see. If I like it I upvote it. If I think more people should see it I boost it.
but if you like it, why shouldn’t people see it? and if you want people to see it, why wouldn’t you like it?
There are quite a lot of things that I don’t like but think more people should see. The stupidity going on in American politics right now is a big one. I don’t like what is happening, but more people should be aware.
Most of the time if I do like it I upvote and boost. It was more of how my brain differentiates between the two
Boost button?
I edited my post to explain my experience with the UI I have.
Kbin is like a go-between for Mastodon and Lemmy.
“Boost” is Mastodon’s version of “retweet”, but Lemmy doesn’t have anything like that.
I haven’t seen a boost button in any of the apps that I’ve tried
Also what does the boost button do?
I edited my post to explain my experience with the UI I have.
Since twitter doesn’t exist, they should just rename boost to retweet.
One of the kbin mobile apps “Artemis” has the option to link the upvote to boost.
It is a Kbin only thing but since I signed up to Mastodon recently it makes a lot more sense.
Because Kbin is tied to Mastodon if you use your Kbin account to also post to Mastodon by clicking ‘Boost’
In Twitter terms, you’re retweeting that comment or post straight to your Mastodon feed for your followers to see.
I set up a separate Mastodon account because I want to use them as different networks at this point, but I can see the appeal of having that ability to crosspost between platforms
EDIT And as the other person said, within Kbin if something is getting Boosted (ie retweeted) it will pick up on that and the comment or post will be pushed further up the list if you’re viewing things by Hot or Top I think. But only on Kbin so most people here won’t know
Interesting. I do not have a mastodon account, but I wonder if this is not why boosting a comment or post might accelerate federation? I have noticed that (some) of my own comments or posts do not show on other instances unless I boost them myself, which not something I prefer doing as upvoting/boosting my own post seems kinda weird…
The only time I really paid attention to it was when upvotes didn’t work to actually upvote people.
I don’t really see the point of boost.
I guess some people are saying it’s like retweets, but since I never really retweeted either…
The way I use it is to help an important/helpful post/comment reach the top of the frontpage/comment thread as I think other people should see it.
Doesn’t upvote already do that though?
I’m almost certain I read that at least for kbin, upvotes don’t mean much, but boosts are what determine comment order and make posts go up ranks.
I’ve always set my comment sorting views to “Top” anyway, i.e. most upvotes at top. Not quite sure why this needs to be complicated like this. If something needs visibility and the community wants to indicate that, they upvote it.
huh, well that’s interesting to know.
It’s funny but I’ve observed that myself. A lot of my posts are simply favorited which doesn’t mean a whole lot because all it is doing is telling the author of the post that you simply like it. By boosting the post, you’re telling the author that not only do you like it, but the post contains useful information, a great philosophy, or even material you could somehow relate to.
Most of us here don’t us kbin and therefore don’t even see the boost button.
I see and use it on Firefish.social though.
I don’t like Boost. I experimented for a few days on Mastodon and was seeing random comments in the middle of a conversation in my feed because some boost happy users.
If it has to exist, it better have some tight guardrails.
