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Upvoting and favouriting should be two distinct options

I apologise if this has been said before.

When we upvote a Thread it shows up in our Favourites. I'm my opinion, upvoting and favouriting should be two distinct actions, and those Threads should be saved in separate lists.
The way it is right now, I'm always a bit reluctant to upvote a Thread. I may like or agree with the content of a Thread, but don't think it's important enough to be saved for later. So I opt to not upvote it because I don't want other Threads that I upvoted and may want to consult again in the future to drown in a sea of less relevant Threads.

I think having two separate options, upvoting and favouriting, would improve the user experience and increase engagement.

5
5 comments

  • The upvote, boost and how it affects your reputation score is being reworked, per the dev. No timeline on it though. I assume a terminology change will happen, but it can't hurt to give feedback when the change goes live. Or comment on the codeberg project issue

  • I've always thought that the metrics for "this is good/bad" should be separate from "this deserves more attention".

    • Cute kitten plays with yarn? Awww, upvote!
    • CEO conducts massive layoff? What a jerk, downvote. Wait, in needs visibility, upvote...?

    I suggest 3 metrics:

    • Add/reduce visibility: This is the user's vote for whether the post should get more or less traction.
    • Good/Bad: The users review of the content. Used to tell whoever reads it what the community thinks of the topic.
    • Relevant/not: The user's opinion of whether the content is relevant to the magazine/sub/etc. Not all vaguely off-topic posts need to have their visibility reduced, but might be used as a metric for locking/moving the thread.

    Now, if you institute all 3 metrics, would that mean more than one pair of up/down arrows? Yes, it would.
    Would it mean that people have to actually think about their votes? Yes, it would.

    One might reply that people would viscerally vote all up or down for a given post, and we'd get a lot of garbage data. I would argue that having all 3 of these in one metric (plus favorites) is already garbage data.

    As for saving threads for later? That should be a sub-option, like checking activity, or reporting.

    • Want more visibility to the content? Boost it! This is what was meant for.
      Bad content, but relevant and needs visibility - then boost and downvote at the same time (or it should be possible on kbin)

  • Mastodon has an option to bookmark a post, which is different to both favourite and boost.