Looks like it was a glitch not a feature update

[ratcreature]

I just clicked a kudo button twice on AO3 by accident because my tablet was lagging, and it resulted in two kudos with my name showing up in the list, rather than one kudo and an error.

But it seems this was just a glitch because of my wonky clicking. At least when I tried leaving kudos again on a WIP I follow that didn't work. Too bad, I wouldn't mind being able to leave more than one, especially with long chaptered stories.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

It's happened to me twice over the last few months, and I've received two kudos from the same logged-in user on one fic, too.

[ratcreature]

Huh. So not that rare then. And it doesn't seem to do bad things to the system with the kudo count or the list when it happens either.

I wonder why they aren't just allowing multiples in general then. I've seen lots of people expressing interest in that. I guess it could lead to inflationary use or something.

[vorpalgirl]

My only guess is it must surely be to encourage commenting...but AO3 already is so low on commenting culture compared to FFN, it makes me wonder if it's worth it.

I think a nice compromise would be on multi-chapter works, allow chapter-specific Kudos. But I don't know how easy that would be to implement.

I will say if you're logged out and on a different computer though you can give a second Kudos as a guest - I've been able to Kudos as a "guest" on mobile, where I am almost never logged in, and on rare occasions I've deliberately accessed a work a second time on my phone because I loved it just that much, that I wanted to give extra Kudos. And it worked :)

[ratcreature]

I know about the guest kudos, but I admit I'm usually too lazy for that. I mean, I use kudos because I'm too lazy to come up with a comment, or reading on a tablet and typing is tedious or such. So I'm unlikely to log out just to kudo. With chaptered WIPs I tend to comment when they provide some "conversational hook" in the chapter (like a cliffhanger or such, where you then can just exlaim about the suspense for example) that makes commenting easier, but mostly I just want to give an indication besides the hit counter that I'm still following.

[melannen]

The double-kudos thing is a long-running server glitch and it tends to get worse when the servers are heavily loaded (like, after yt.)

I think the reason they don´t allow multi-kudos is to stop people from easily inflating their own kudos count by getting their friends to kudo fifty times; that would make sort-by-kudos pretty useless. (If they do ever institute it, I suspect it will either be once-per chapter or heavily rate-limited.)

[ratcreature]

But couldn't these hypothetical hordes of friends just as well inflate the kudo count through multiple guest kudos? AFAIK the guest kudos count as much as named kudos, and I assume with them being left while not logged in you can leave some as often as you like.

[melannen]

There is rate-limiting on guest kudos, I´m not sure what it is but I think it has something to do with clearing cookies - you can´t just leave multiple guest kudos by pressing the button a lot, you have to at minimum switch browsers or clear cookies or wait a few days. So yeah, there are ways to artificially inflate the kudos count, but they take at least a little work; you can't just easily add hundreds of kudos without using the kind of bots that would probably constitute abuse.

[ratcreature]

I assume you could do the same cookie thing with logged in users though, like leave a date stamp for kudo/story id in the cookies and make it so you can only leave kudos on a story once a day, which would allow you to leave kudos per chapter when they are posted as WIPs or for rereads. So I don't think that is really the reason for this.

My assumption was always that the "kudos" were originally set up as an analog to the "like" and afaik in most of those systems you can only like something once as well, so nobody thought that users might want to leave multiples.