When you answer a question, why does it automatically make you "say thank you" for your own answer?
1 Answer
When a question has multiple answers, those answers are ordered on the page by the number of hearts each answer has received (the more hearts, the higher on the page the answer shows up).
When you write an answer, Socratic automatically marks you as having "hearted" your own answer. This might feel a bit odd, but there's a good reason for this.
Hearts are meant to show how useful an answer is to the community. Whenever a user hearst an answer, they are endorsing that answer as useful and thanking the person who wrote it.
Our thinking is that if you write an answer to a question, you endorse that answer (otherwise you wouldn't have written it). The fact that you endorse that answer should reflect in the ranking of that answer.
If we didn't automatically heart answers when they are written, the contributor would then have to decide whether or not to heart their own answer, which is an awkward decision. It's unclear what the right thing to do would be.
Our solution was to automatically upvote an answer when the contributor writes it.
