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.
I’ve always thought that the metrics for “this is good/bad” should be separate from “this deserves more attention”.
I suggest 3 metrics:
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)