Unless Ernest changed this too and I missed it, boosts still work with the microblogging portion of the fediverse, such as Mastodon. Upvotes and downvotes only interact with the “threadiverse”.

So my understanding is that boosts are now reflecting on threads as 2 upvotes, whereas on microblog posts they reflect as boosts and as 2 upvotes but only on the threadiverse sites.

(Someone correct me if wrong please!)

Everything you’re talking is perception, friend. You chose to take my comment that way. The dev tools were being worked on long before this post.

As I said before, I’m not making this up, the phenomenon is studied and the effect is proven.

In what way is it a huge deal? In what way was it loud? (Until now)

This person had a handful of heavily downvoted posts and interactions so they never made it to the “hot” or “active” pages.

(Are we talking about the same person?)

If you take a poll of everyone in this thread I would bet almost everyone hadn’t seen these posts or heard of the username.

But now they have, with the help of this post.

True, agreed. I’m only commenting on the idea that these people or groups shouldn’t get free advertising when people find them. These posts that are blasting their way to the top of “hot” just like a trending news article are counter-productive. On the Internet, which is fundamentally always at least partially an uncontrolled environment, it’s better take actions for these things that are as invisible as possible.