This is from the various services trying to talk to each other in ways they weren't originally designed to do, really. Our "upvote" is a mastodon "favorite" (like) while our "boost" is functionally a retweet/reblog. Kbin tries to bridge the gap between threaded content and microblogging, and it gets about 90% of the way there; all it really needs to do is change it so that upvotes are the ones that contribute to reputation instead of boosts, which are functionally useless outside a fully microblog-style environment.

Lol, the developer has acknowledged it doesn't make sense at the moment and it will be changed.

It is currently broken which is why it functions in such a terrible way. A fix has been made, but not yet pushed to live. Hold tight :)

@Brkdncr

There's definitely room for improvement, but I like what I see so far and don't have a problem learning a new paradigm. I'm sure that as the platform matures things will become more consistent.