It comes from Lemmy’s origin as a link aggregator. You can imagine that every link one the web has 0 votes by default. When you submit a post for the first time you are voting for it. You are saying “this is interesting to this community”. In this way the submitter is no different than any other voter, each upvote is saying “I think this is interesting” and every downvote is saying “I don’t think this is interesting”.

It’s a norm. There was a discussion here on Lemmy regarding this some months ago.

I think it’s a trivial issue because the sorting algorithm doesn’t really care about the upvote, in terms of all posts being on equal footing. This is, of course, assuming people don’t un-upvote their posts.

I also think it’s trivial in terms of people engaging with the post, because most people will know a single upvote is OPs vote. If they don’t know this, the difference between a post with 0 upvotes and 1 is meaningless, especially given that there are no visible downvotes (which you can clearly see on Lemmy). Moreover, the difference between 0 and 1 votes is nothing compared to, say 20 or 400.

In your honor and for the meme, I’ll un-upvote this comment.

why would you want to unvote your post?
The way I see it, on platforms where it’s not automatic, it is the culture to not like your own posts, even though everyone would logically want to boost their own opinion. I’ve seen toxic behavior if people find out someone is doing that. On twitter for example. But when it’s automatic, that culture just doesn’t exist.

I have to manually “unvote” my posts.

Do you think you’re some sort of white knight or something? No one really cares.

I thought this was a bug. Lol