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Why is the boost button so underused?
(kbin.social)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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One thing I try to keep in mind when boosting content is that if (hypothetically) someone is following me from a microblogging platform, what they will get from me in their feed is a) my original posts and b) whatever content I boost. So it has the potential of affecting visibility of content beyond the original threads or community it belongs to. This is especially true if you make use of the microblogging function in kbin to interact with the broader Fediverse, in which case people might follow you from there.
In consequence, I try to boost content that I think has a general interest beyond the specific thread it is located in, and that I think calls for extra attention. If I merely agree with something or find it valuable in context I stick to just upvoting.
There is of course no problem with following a different philosophy - there's no real reason to worry about whether your profile lends itself to being followed by Mastodon users. But it's something to be aware of when figuring out how to use the function. :)
I'm not a person with a qualified opinion by any means but that sounds like it can be abused to streamline shady stuff like astroturfing or brigading.
It's rather the opposite, as it is the alternative to an algorithm choosing which content will be visible. Algorithms are easily abused - a curated list of real people you follow and trust to share interesting content less so.
On kbin it's a little different thhough, as content widely boosted across the fediverse is given improved visibility by default. In this system we rely more on servers full of bad actors being defederated.
Oh I hope it won't cause a ruckus on kbin. But I bet you can easily switch it off it it gets blatantly abused.