Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:
- Upvotes & Downvotes function akin to Reddit
- Boosts count as two Upvotes (link)
- Favorites are added to https://kbin.social/fav if you Upvote (link)
- Reputation Points have been updated
In addition to that, Ernest stated that “there is no connection between reputation points and sorting algorithms. It’s just info in the profile” (link)
Critical difference. Reddit had groupthink literally enforced by the software. If you had negative karma in a subreddit and you tried to post, it would say “You are doing that too much, please wait 8 minutes to post again”, even if your last post was 2 weeks ago.
You have to try hard to get negative karma in a sub, or just never use it. Frankly, if a person frequents a sub and consistent say things majority of people dislike, is that person really right for that sub?
You can get -60 karma on conspiracy sub for saying that witches aren’t real therefore John Podesta doesn’t practice witchcraft.
Also having that negative karma feature on any political sub amounts to a total ban on all politically incorrect opinions. If most people on a political sub are for candidate A, you will never be allowed to share your support for candidate B. Making it wrongly seem like candidate B has 0% support and candidate A has 100% support.