See, I always thought that felt really weird when Reddit did it, I never liked that. To me, if a post has zero up votes, that should mean either no one has seen it yet or that everyone who has feels entirely neutral about it, it’s right at 0. If there’s at least 1 upvote, that should mean at least 1 person found it good, and if it’s negative, at least 1 person thinks it isn’t. To start that total at 1 instead of 0 feels arbitrary and like designed to be less intuitive, not more.
Like someone said above (but making the opposite point from them here), if you didn’t like it, why would you post it? You having posted or commented at all is evidence you meant to, have you ever commented or posted by accident? There’s intentionality there by default, I don’t see why it needs the auto self-upvote to start with.
Yeah, and like, if all you have to do is post a bunch with auto upvotes on to get rep, is that rep real? Isn’t it a lot more real if other people have upvoted your stuff on purpose, not you? As valuable as that even is anyway