Bad take aside, It’s frustrating the upvotes and downvotes I get on kbin don’t match up to how they appear on lemmy, or hell, even other instances of kbin.
I’ll have posts that have 20 upvotes here on kbin.cafe, but 2 elsewhere. I’ll have posts that will have no downvotes at all on kbin.social, but they’ll be present on lemmy.
How am I supposed to gauge people’s reactions when the feedback isn’t consistant between sites and instances?
But like, what does it matter if downvotes aren’t federated?
I think Kbin just doesn’t support downvote federation yet. Dunno if it’s just a Kbin thing or if Lemmy also hasn’t gotten around to it, but either way, it’s something that needs to be fixed.
If this is deliberate, it makes no sense. There are reasons to want or not want downvotes, but you need to commit to one instead of having this confusing jank where you only see downvotes from your instance.
Lemmy is inconsistent with how it handles downvotes, because Lemmy supports disabling downvotes at the server level. Kbin is consistent about how it handles downvotes, but that consistency is in no federating.
Both of these are purposeful design choices, and both reflect the fact that downvotes are actually kind of toxic as fuck. They’re vestigial from Reddit, and something people expect to see in a content aggregator, but should probably be done away with.
Kbin apparently federates upvotes but not downvotes. I guess it’s an attempt to be polite? Kinda frustrating though.
I’m not opposed to a change, but I’ll admit I’m perfectly fine with how it is now. I’m concerned that having a universally recognized karma score will just open up avenues for karma-related spamming, toxicity, manipulation, etc. People got dumb on Reddit over karma. Plus, if all you really want is to know if your posts are being received well, really well, poorly, or terribly by other users, I actually think the numbers we currently see are still plenty adequate to serve that purpose.
I prefer this too. I look at things from kbin.social so I never learn just how many downvotes I’m getting.