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?
It was quite a smart choice.
But another way to do things could also be to disallow users to upvote their own content. Either by disabling the button, or just silently ignoring it.
One is probably more to avoid user to complain they can’t do it. The other more logical at a dry level