I always thought it was a pretty smart idea on Reddit’s side to have the posts and comments be automatically upvoted by their author, saving them the tough choice between playing fair or boosting their initial reach a little; and if you had particularly low self-esteem, this enabled you to reduce your own points by not one, but two, by self-downvoting.
Here, both upvotes and downvotes (or rather, favourites and reduces) start at 0, and you have the option to upvote your post manually (which I’ve already seen some people do) - which, while currently does not increase your reputation, does give you that small initial boost by making it look like people are starting to engage with your post.

What do you think - should the posts and comments be automatically upvoted by the author? If not, are you fine with people upvoting themselves, or do you feel it’s unfair towards the ones that don’t do it?

  • BigVault
    link
    fedilink
    02 years ago

    Not fussed either way, if someone wants the little boost from the initial +1 they see from their own upvote, more power to them.
    I’m happy starting at zero and seeing where the community takes me.

    • parrot-party
      link
      fedilink
      02 years ago

      I’ve seen Redditors that took the time to manually unvote themselves. They like playing hard mode I guess

      • Timwi
        link
        fedilink
        12 years ago

        Unless they told you and you believe them, you can’t really know if it’s them who unvoted themselves, since Reddit only shows the total.