I snapped about it but not sure if people understood what I meant, so thought I'd do a quick post which may reach more people.
Making reblogs "worth" something has been difficult for a long time, even many who use them well may not get any feedback that it's because of their reblogs a post receive more curation or got more engagement, etc.
Front-ends however could easily determine how a user got to find out about the post, let's take a look at @peakd in this example here on my feed. This post by @solumviz is something I'm interested in, now ignore the fact it's posted in the @holozing community which means I would've probably found it sooner or later anyway - let's assume that without the reblog by @bananzell I may have missed it. This means that this reblog was well timed and got at least one other curator to check it out.
Now imagine if @peakd (and other front-ends sharing this info with each other) would place rebloggers in a certain color-range, in my example I made @bananzell's username green when viewed from the feed, and this would continue on and stay the same color when viewed inside the post as well, even from the author itself.
Now imagine if the color-code also continued towards the voting list:
The idea is basically to show others that a post received additional votes and potentially even comments through the reblog. The front-ends could potentially track if a post was opened through the original author or through the reblog of another user.
I've been thinking if and how this could be abused, but since there's no rewards to be had I doubt people would attempt to abuse it. I don't know how it would handle if a post has been reblogged by more than one account you happen to follow, maybe it'd just pick the first one that did so. People attempting to reblog too much would naturally get unfollowed if it's becoming spammy.
The idea is simply for the author to notice that a post received more curation and engagement thanks to a reblog one of their followers did. It's meant to build different kind of connections between accounts and empower reblogs with a feedback system that let's both the author and reblogger know that their reblog had an impact.
Anyway, maybe this idea could be implemented in a different way, I'm all ears, just thought I'd throw it out there and see what ya'll think about it to begin with. Let me know!