I agree that it devalues those first few hearts in the sense that they're not based on the merit of your post, so you a) can't tell if your post is good until you get more and b) can't tell at a glance whether someone else's post is good.
However.
I thought that people liked what I wrote, so I kept contributing more comments and more articles, some more technical, some less.
The ruse was absolutely worth it. If it encourages people to share more of their experiences, develop their writing ability, etc. having to wait until a post gets more than a handful of hearts before you can judge its quality without reading it is a small price to pay.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
But given that, if you write a post that's really low quality and immediately get half a dozen hearts, it's going to reinforce the idea that you can continue to write crap. Not that we have much low quality stuff here (yet...), I'm saying that encouragement is only good when it's genuine encouragement from people who appreciate you. If we start taking things for granted we're back to the point where nobody need get anything at all.
I agree that it devalues those first few hearts in the sense that they're not based on the merit of your post, so you a) can't tell if your post is good until you get more and b) can't tell at a glance whether someone else's post is good.
However.
The ruse was absolutely worth it. If it encourages people to share more of their experiences, develop their writing ability, etc. having to wait until a post gets more than a handful of hearts before you can judge its quality without reading it is a small price to pay.
🦄
But given that, if you write a post that's really low quality and immediately get half a dozen hearts, it's going to reinforce the idea that you can continue to write crap. Not that we have much low quality stuff here (yet...), I'm saying that encouragement is only good when it's genuine encouragement from people who appreciate you. If we start taking things for granted we're back to the point where nobody need get anything at all.
Yeah, that's a fair point. I suppose "encouragement" hearts should ideally be paired with actual feedback.