PSA: Upvote is not an upvote like you are used to (like Reddit) - "Boost" is the Reddit Upvote
Like the title says, if you want to upvote something on KBin, you should use the Boost link, not the upvote button (Why? Don't know...)
The upvote button doesn't seem to do much, but Boost accomplishes what Reddit's upvote did. So if you're looking to encourage a post, use the Boost link.
This is a result of the original design. Kbin, up until just before the peak traffic hit, was using boosts as upvotes and favorites/likes were just below the post/thread (where boost sits now). Lemmy does it the way it is now (likes = upvotes) so Ernest changed it to match Lemmy behavior. But just as he changed it, he hadn’t changed the calculation for reputation to match when the server nearly melted down and he has to spend all his time just trying to keep the site alive by himself.
I see you’re on a different Kbin instance. Was this intended to be a threaded reply, out of curiosity? Because it shows up as a top-level comment on the post for me.
So sometime in the future an upvote will be used to score the post and get it on the "frontpage", and a Boost is just like a save feature to save posts to my microblog?
You can have a look here to see a test instance with some of the things that are coming, Ernest (the admin) has been merging in a range of tickets including bug fixes, UI improvements and other bits.
There seems to be an ever growing backlog of feature requests and bug fixes in the issues list but a fair bit is getting sorted out behind the scenes.
for me, the main selling point of kbin over lemmy was the transparency in user interactions on here. the last straw on the camel's back over at lemmy for me was seeing blatant vote manipulation hiding behind the end-user anonymity; kept an eye on some accounts that would instantly always get the same number of upvotes, dependent on the specific account, less than 3-5 seconds after posting. it was always some single-digit amount (I assume to not get flagged by the system), but that's all it takes to signal others to feel safer upvoting it.
the same can be done likewise to bury others' content that they can view as competition to what they want seen, multiple early downvotes can act as a subconscious deterrent to others