Hypothesis confirmed by experiment. Enjoy the boost.

So basically a boost acts like a "super-upvote" (in addition to acting like a share). Man, this is going to be interesting.

EDIT: See replies below for more details.

Oof. It feels like every new social media platform insists on replicating the mistakes of their predecessors. You'd think by now there would be an established body of design patterns for social media. This looks like it might be relevant, even though it's quite old now.

edit: it's also interesting that only downvotes count for "reputation points", so anyone who raises their heads above the parapet in a contentious thread is at risk of instantly having a negative reputation [edit 2: QED]. I have no idea what effect that will have though...