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A UI idea on how to merge boosting with up/downvote buttons into one unified voting system in a visual way
(media.kbin.social)
Artemis might use a swipe gesture to visually hint at the relation between upvoting and boosting, as shown in the main animation. Here's a static app mockup with both swipe levels displayed. I'd also imagine that there should be a setting that auto-upvotes posts when boosting.
This looks really cool, but it depicts the boost as a super upvote when that's not what it is. Boosting is like retweeting—sharing something for those that look at your profile. Right now, this is pretty limited—boosted content is in a separate tab on your profile, and you can view some of the stuff someone boosted if you look at their profile from Mastodon—but I don't think it makes sense to pretend the boost is something it isn't, especially if the feature gets improved in the future. Changing the symbol to something more retweet-esque would help a lot.
It's not just one single thing tho, more of an upvote/share combo. I go into more detail about that in the main post on @kbinMeta. While the mockup doesn't necessarily make it obvious, I think it still adds to the understanding a bit more than just having a text button.
But yeah, changing the icon might work. Just throwing out ideas to provoke some discussion within the community.
As far as I know, it really is primarily a share button. While it does give people 2 reputation points (which I don't think people should be caring about), the main purpose of the boost is to be a retweet button, not a super upvote. That's probably why it's set aside on the UI, and it's probably why it has the same name as Mastodon's retweet equivalent. This visual you have looks cool, but I think it changes the UI from unclear to misleading.
I think that's how it functions for Mastodon, but Lemmy and Kbin use boost more as "+2 upvotes", as it's used as the scoring metric for the sorting algos.