Yes upvotes are federated. Kbin factors in boosts too, these are also federated within and outside kbin - but not really used on Lemmy. Downvotes, a bit less clear - I think they are federated within/between Lemmy(?) but not with or between kbin instances.
Building a game from scratch sounds nice on paper, but if you are also trying to learn programming I'd suggest smaller steps.
Start by looking at some really simple games (think Tron, or snake) and figure out how they work, adapt them, break the code, fix the code, change the rules of the game and make it work differently...
Once you are confident changing code then try writing stuff...Much as I'd love to recommend a language from 20 years ago (e.g. Pascal) realistically you want to be looking at something like Python as an entry language these days.
I think Hot and Top are sorted according to upvotes + boosts (weighted x2) less downvotes. I think the plan is reputation will work the same way (once it gets fixed).
...but reading this thread I wonder if that needs a rethink - people seem to boost rather more liberally than expected/intend in order to game this algorithm.
It was thought/expected that, since boosts effectively retweet the comment, they would be used quite sparingly - this is why they have a relatively high significance.
We could probably do with some clarity on all of this because this line of discussion has been repeated many times and there is quite a lot of hearsay and misinformation being parroted. @Ernest ?
Ernest switched the upvote from being boosts to favourites shortly before the Reddit exodus, he did this to better align with Lemmy.Boosts and Favourites are both wider fediverse things - using them keeps compatibility there.
The switch is implemented in hot and top sorting (as you note I think a upvote/favourite counts 50% of a boost), but it sounds like reputation wasn't fixed at the same time, for now reputation is boosts less downvotes which Ernest himself has acknowledged doesn't make much sense.
Seems like this is kbin Vs Lemmy difference, we at kbin get to see people's "reputation" (yes including Lemmy users ...with caveats) from this thread it seems Lemmy doesn't easily expose the same.
That said the reputation system is kbin is currently broken as upvotes don't count - it's a known bug which will no doubt be corrected soon.
OP, This highlights something else - I think the reason you are getting down votes is that most people seeing this thread are not on lemmy.world. The heading is a bit misleading (or potentially wrong) from the perspective of a federated user - which is most of us!
But the question "why" strands. 200 upvotes will get you on the front page at the moment. Why not stop there, why make your bot accounts so conspicuous that they are basically garenteed to get deleted?
It seems almost certain that there are farms creating these accounts - but why? The sheer volume of them is going to make them easy to identify and delete, and if the admins of the instances don't delete them the instances will be defederated in short order.I fail to see any value to having 1 million+ bot accounts. What are we missing?
perhaps there should be rate limits for users trying to create new communities?
perhaps communities should expire into the wild if they are bagged and not used for X days/weeks?
perhaps there needs to be some manual burden to keep 'bagged' but unused communities live, say every five days a prompt "hey looks like you are not using xyz community. If you still need it please solve this CAPTCHA, how many of these squares contain road signs?"
The term 'unused' would probably need finessing since a bot could likely post junk once a week to keep things from flagging, for that reason you might be wise not to be too transparent about what rules are being used, just that there are rules and checks?
This is true, and for the most part extremely good news... But are also stories circulating about a landslide of bot accounts being created on Lemmy recently so numbers from the last 24h or so may want adjusting down slightly.
Yes upvotes are federated. Kbin factors in boosts too, these are also federated within and outside kbin - but not really used on Lemmy. Downvotes, a bit less clear - I think they are federated within/between Lemmy(?) but not with or between kbin instances.