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Discussion on: Auto Like On All My Comments

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

I'm with you on this one!

It's always felt a bit odd to me that I'd automatically like my own comment.

  1. You should not be able to like your own post IMHO.

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.

  1. My post should not be auto-liked by me when I press enter.

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.

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ildi profile image
Ildi

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.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

From what I understand, automatically ❤️ing your own comment serves 2 purposes:

  • ❤️ing a comment is an act of affirmation, to share support or agreement for the idea expressed in the comment. It follows that you would support your own comment, which is why you posted it, so therefore your own ❤️ is implied, and
  • since you can like your own comment, if it wasn't automatically ❤️ed then people who don't ❤️ their own comment end up with their comment ranked lower compared to those who do, so the automatic ❤️ on your own comment exists to level the scoring system.

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.

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ildi profile image
Ildi

@ellativity I really like those 2 purposes and I think they work well. Thank you for breaking that down!

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jamie profile image
Jamie Gaskins

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.

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

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.