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 :)

It'll work itself out eventually. Kbin is still super new. Ernest is hard at work every day

Kbin is basically still in alpha. They're fixing stuff like this. It'll be fixed soon.

@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.

From what I can see the upvote / downvote both work as you'd expect now (as in upvoting curates content). There was apparently a period of time where 'boost' was the upvote mechanic but that's been changed

I've read it's a work in progress and may be changed at some point to be consistent across the Fediverse. Poor guy is slammed with feature requests and bug reports with Kbin.