Boosting threads is useful in that it helps shift a post from 'new' (which most people don't check) to 'hot' (which is the default feed for most people). Posts from small communities often die with 0 upvotes and 0 downvotes without that.
Just did a little unscientific test. Made a post in a community that usually gets 20+ upvotes within an hour. No self-boost puts it at 1 upvote after an hour.
That's because of a bug in the hot sorting. It was working fine for a while, and then broke. Upvoting your own post also fixes it. We should probably have our posts self-upvoted by default anyway, like on reddit and lemmy.
We should probably have our posts self-upvoted by default anyway, like on reddit and lemmy.
Well, Lemmy doesn't either. It pretends to exactly so you don't (I assume that's the reasoning). It doesn't actually add an upvote in your name and so it's also not counted as upvoted by you by other platforms. I can only guess it's trying to prevent people from adding an upvote by making them think the platform already did it for them.
Just check Lemmy posts on kbin (considering voting is public). How many of them have the creator as one of the upvoters? New posts with 1 upvote on Lemmy have 0 on kbin.
Discovered this a few weeks ago while testing some federation stuff.
Alternatively, upvote/boost your own posts by default when posting.
I've struggled with this question before myself. On the one hand, there is a notable impact in visibility on posts which I've self-upvoted versus posts which I did not self-upvote, so it does feel like an unfair advantage. On the other hand, I am also a community member in the community I post. I wouldn't post something, if I didn't think it contributes to the overall community. Plus, there's a bug in kbin going on, that new posts only show up in new but not in hot at all, until there is at least some sort of interaction (a comment, or an upvote, or a boost).
I don't upvote/boost my own content on principle. What I've started doing instead when I notice it is boost every other top level comment in the thread to restore parity. That's the only way to make it make sense.
Removing the ability for users to boost their comments or threads can indeed be a solution to address the issues backpack battles you've highlighted.
In addition to what PugJesus said, it seems to me that a single boost moving a post/comment to the top of the conversation is also a symptom of a bigger issue - which is that a lot of Fediverse communities are still very small. As a community grows in size (from dozens/hundreds of people to thousands/tens of thousands or more) a single boost should have less and less of an impact.
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