livus

livus, 5 months ago

@CoffeeAddict yeah it's made me very responsible about downvoting.

It has also made me more inclined to discuss things because now I don't just lazily "downvote to disagree" and move on.

Also, when someone weird starts following me around and downvoting all my posts, I can see who it is so it doesn't bother me.

It's way better than sitting there thinking "what did I do wrong".

livus, 5 months ago

If a lot of people outside of your instance think you made a bad comment but few inside your instance do, limited downvote federation creates an inaccurate representation of what people think.

But we're cooler than anyone else. :P

It's much more important to me to know what kbin thinks about my comment, than it is to know what the aggregate of kbin+hexbear or kbin+lemmy.world thinks.

And if you do want to know you just hit view on original instance and see all the votes.

livus, 5 months ago

I mean beehaw has no downvotes and they're not toxic at all if viewed from within their instance.

livus, 5 months ago

@ernest

Personally I like the current system because:

1. We on kbin have not developed a knee-jerk "downvote everything I disagree with" behaviour that reddit had and lemmy.world is starting to have.

I think this is because we can see each other's downvotes and so we use them more responsibly. People from other instances don't have that so they behave differently.

Downvote-to-disagree has an offputting effect on discussion and creates echo chambers.

2. Not federating downvotes from much bigger instances allows us to develop our own culture here on kbin without it being buried in an avalanche from elsewhere.

Brigading from places like hexbear doesn't really affect us.

I'd prefer that kbin communities continue to develop based on the ethos of the people here, rather than potentially having our upvotes cancelled out by downvotes from a larger instance.

livus, 5 months ago

@ThatOneKirbyMain2568

(B) similar expressions from other instances aren't drowned out.

Some other instances are so much bigger than ours though. The "drowning out" will likely come the other way.

I don't have time to go through and find it right now but somewhere in my comments is screenshots of the difference in voting patterns on a comment thread (it happened to be one where someone was saying kbin is mostly trolls, so it was polarizing).

Kbin had voted in a completely different way to the lemmy, but because they were so much bigger than us, the aggregate would have looked like lemmy was the consensus.

Part of the appeal of an instance for me is its culture. It's hard to develop that when we risk being drowned out.

livus, 5 months ago

@CoffeeAddict

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.

Me too. I'm with you on this, I find our current voting culture way better and more welcoming than most of the lemmys.

livus, 5 months ago

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.

livus, 5 months ago

@ThatOneKirbyMain2568

If we don't federate downvotes, I think we'd be better off just ditching downvotes entirely and instead having something more conducive to how we want instant negative feedback to be used.

This would be my second preference.

livus, 5 months ago

@HeartyBeast that brings back memories...

livus, 5 months ago

@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 like I said, it's my second preference.

If you're asking why it's not my first choice, the answer's partly that I'm happy with the status quo for reasons I've already gone into, and partly pragmatism.

@ernest has a really long to-do list and figuring out how to implement it in a way that wouldn't undermine the report button or do something crazy e.g to reputation is probably not the best use of his time right now.

livus, 5 months ago

@CoffeeAddict I might be wrong but I think boosts are more important when we interact with Mastodon?

livus, 6 months ago

I really love it. Thanks to microblogs sections of magazines, I'm now getting plenty of mastodon content and even following some mastodon people despite not having a mastodon account.

livus, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I like it being at the bottom. That way you get fewer people coming in to all say the exact same thing without interacting with each other.

It's sort of like the design is "listen before you speak."

livus, 7 months ago

Excellent. The future is federated.

livus, 9 months ago

Good article, this person federates.

I don't get why the author seems to be saying we can't see lists of lemmy communities from kbin, though.

livus, 10 months ago

Off topic but I just love your name/image so much!

livus, 10 months ago

Well, it's magical! It reminds me slightly of the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke but way more striking. Strange how these things come into being.

I really need to get a proper avatar. I just grabbed the first thing I saw that was the right size from my image folder.

Edit: omg those images are all fantastic. You can have a whole FaceDeer empire.

livus, 10 months ago

Remember, kbin.social is just one instance of kbin. Ernest banning something on kbin.social does not mean banning it from the fediverse.

It could pop up on another fediverse site or even another kbin site.

livus, 10 months ago

With all due respect poststructuralist academics (many of whom are dead) are not the sociocultural leaders of anyone.

That 1977 petition is heinous, but I don't think that being influenced by poststructuralism some 47 years later means anyone has to agree with those politics.

livus, 10 months ago

Tangential but it's wild to me that you studied Gayle Rubin repeatedly and the pedophilia angle somehow didn't come up. It's literally right there in her writing. Her work was only referenced in one postgrad course I took and 99% of the class totally hated on her for it.

I have to say I don't think this "rightist"/"leftist" paradigm is really working in this discussion. It's way too simplistic and implies that there are two monolithic worldviews at different ends of a linear compendium. But that's just not the case. Many of the theorists don't even agree with each other, or with their own past selves, etc etc.

And in the grassroots a lot of it doesn't even filter down. Soup kitchen workers who never read any of Butler's word salads, junior investment partners who haven't even read Adam Smith...

Sapere aude. The world is too interesting and complex to narrow down to two "ideologies".

livus, 10 months ago

Your experience sounds unfortunate. It was pretty darn weird of them to gloss over Foucault and not Heidegger! Irresponsible, even.

I'm not American, and find some of their conflations between politics, social policy, and economic policy a little hard to get behind. It's far from universal.