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I've mentioned multiple times that le Reddit has a really good algorithm for placing posts and it seems good to recreate that. I noticed that posts over here have a default score of 1, but it seems like that's just cosmetic. I get this impression from how the UI works, and also I see that the detailed score is +0/-0 by default. I'm thinking: perhaps it'd be good to default to giving users a real self-upvote. Since the score is measured against the age, this makes a difference even if it's the same for everyone. I think new posts will fall off the initial positioning a bit later and perhaps it's easier to climb to the top. I don't know the details since I'm not the math guy, that's you @x0x7, but it's a gut feeling. What do you think?
tl;dr: Already exists.
For math purposes, posts do start with a single upvote. It just doesn't show up cosmetically in the (+0|-0) block. If we want new posts to have a little more advantage we could start them with two points. I think one problem with that is if something truly does deserve a downvote it would be that much harder to get it to the zero and below territory.
While we are talking about the math I may as well fill you guys in on more. For score calculations no post ever truly has a score of zero, or the result would be that they would be perma-hidden. Letting a single vote from a single user perma-hide a post would be overpowered. So scores with values 0 and below are translated to reciprocals. I also recently started squaring the reciprocals because they needed more punch.
But I may have an off by one error in the code because downvoting to zero does not feel like it does much at all. There may be a 0 -> 1/1 translation going on. If that is the case the squaring may have been unneeded and I could undo that. Then it would be 0 -> 1/2, -1 -> 1/3, -2 -> 1/4.