I am not sure if this is on purpose, but every time I create a new post comment (either on dev.to or forem.dev), my comment is auto-liked by me. This feels odd to me.
You should not be able to like your own post IMHO. You can't in stackoverflow.com. This seems like superfluous self-promotion.
My post should not be auto-liked by me when I press enter.
I realize programmatically it would be difficult to change everyone's previous post, but you could change it going forward.
J
Top comments (9)
I'm with you on this one!
It's always felt a bit odd to me that I'd automatically like my own comment.
As for having the ability to like my own post versus not, I'm kind of indifferent to this, but I definitely see your point. It seems unnecessary and even though it only slightly skews the numbers, it is just offering folks a method of self-promotion.
Totally agree. At least currently you don't auto-like your post when posting it, but you do auto-like your comment when posting it. I don't think you should auto-like either.
I would be curious to hear some insight into the thinking behind why auto-liking comments is a thing at the moment. There might be an interesting reason for the logic there. Personally I think it’s fun that you can react to your own posts and comments in general. The auto-like is definitely something I’d like to hear more opinions about.
From what I understand, automatically ❤️ing your own comment serves 2 purposes:
I'm not a dev but I guess that allowing everyone to react to everything, rather than preventing posters from reacting to their own content, simplifies the site a lot. I don't know for a fact, so don't quote me on this. Maybe @maestromac , @jamie , or @djuber will have a better idea of the hard, cold facts here.
@ellativity I really like those 2 purposes and I think they work well. Thank you for breaking that down!
Concur. Comments with more replies and likes are more likely to be shown further up because they're factors in a couple of different scoring algorithms.
I believe the reason we implement auto-self-liked comments as opposed to nobody being allowed to like their own comments wasn't necessarily a conscious choice, but it has prior art since that's exactly what Reddit does. And IIRC we've incorporated that concept into the scoring algorithms, so if we change it we may need to revisit them.
Thank ya for this y'all!
I wasn't aware of the reasoning here, but this totally makes sense. 🙂
I'm personally still not a huge fan of auto-liking my comments, but I see where it comes from and can understand the decision here.
On the other hand, this is exactly how it works on Reddit where all posts and comment start out with 1 upvote.
I'm not saying that I necessarily think that's the best approach just pointing out that there are examples for both approaches in the wild.
To me it's a confusing UX. I'd rather have the option of turning this feature off in the admin settings.
The auto-like makes me waste a few seconds looking at it until my brain realizes that this is a default thing. For new users, they would also be wondering who liked their post so fast. I don't see much value in it personally.
It seems to me that it is bad practice in UI/UX design to auto-press buttons. A button is a means for a human to control a machine, not a machine to control a human.
Personally, I have to constantly remember that I have to push a button to remove my own likes from my own comments :(