I have never cared about my actual score personally, and I think the people who actually care about their sticker ratings to the point of complaining that they're getting too many mean ones are mega faggots, but I like checking out other's scores to see if they were a good user or... BoxerShorts. I think making changes to cater to people who are scared of stickers is really gay. Let them be scared. I've seen a lot of people say that this change is good because it will be "less of an echo-chamber" and it will cause people to "be more open", but in reality, most people who get neg-bombed are not being bombed because of an unpopular opinion, they are being bombed because their post was stupid, off-topic, trolling, goes against the culture of the site, etc. It was genuinely a good tool to keep newfags in line and have them learn quickly. As for "being more open"? Why would you want to be more open on Kiwifarms?
N Null said in the big announcement thread that he wants engagement for other areas of the site, but this change is really counter-intuitive for that. Those notifications were a good way to know that people actually read your post, that maybe there was activity on a thread you hadn't watched in a while, and that there was a conversation happening. Right now it sort of feels like you're speaking into a void, which is the opposite of what you want if you want more engagement with more obscure areas of the site.
I Yes, there's the "watch thread" option, but sometimes I'm just not that interested in a discussion, just a tad bit interested, and to me the extra menu makes it feel more like an actual commitment, like I'm reading this thread for the long run. Also, often I'll forget where I was with that option, unless I bookmark, but my bookmarks are already cluttered enough and there's an annoying bug with them right now so I don't want more. Is this a personal and illogical gripe? Yes, but this is about personal user experience, and I want to emphasize that it's really more than just "BAWWW MY SCORE" to a lot of people.
G They were also a good way to know that your posts were well received, and no, this is not about da DOPAMINE RUSH, this is genuinely about wanting to know if my posts are high quality, informative, funny, etc. As a direct example, I usually would never do long "analytical" posts and didn't want to do clip dump posts with long descriptions/commentary too often because I thought it was too autistic and that people weren't going to be interested, but to my surprise those posts were very well received, so I kept doing them. If I couldn't see that people actually read that shit I wouldn't have kept going.
G Taking choice away from the user because of a few retards is always, ALWAYS bad, especially when there was already an option to opt-out of sticker notifs if you wanted to. It's even worse that the work-around involves going into an entirely separate menu which intentionally doesn't even work right now. I've seen so many sites, games, etc, just go to shit because the devs keep making everything intentionally more vague and it's just a shame to see it happen here too.
E I see now that there's a reaction score indicator, but I don't see what the point of that is vs just the raw numbers. Besides, a negative score is a spectrum. "Negative" doesn't indicate if the person is just a newfag, or if they're Tommy Tooter.
R If you got to the end of this really long post, thank you. If you agree, feel free to message me directly about how you agree and I'm awesome. If you disagree, feel free to reach out to me to tell me that this post sucked and that I should kill myself. Thank you again and have a good evening.
