Absolutely not. Sometimes you say something stupid, and people make you feel bad about it. That’s healthy, that’s good.

Sometimes you say something unpopular but correct… You need to recognize that it’s unpopular, and learn to package the idea in a more palatable way or approach the topic less directly.

You should feel bad for rage baiting… Even if you’re unambigiously right, you need to read the room and meet people where they are if you want to change minds. You don’t need to change your views, but you need to adapt your framing or you’re just rilling people up

Negative social responses are a good thing, it’s required for a community. Social rejection hurts so bad because we so rarely feel it, and that’s sickness. Most people can have few or no negative interactions, because when money is involved, people will smile and take your money

It’s such a little thing, but it’s a very gentle form of rejection… Avoiding it is not good, and so from a public health perspective we should default to showing it

Fudging data to protect feelings of bad posters is how you get more bad posters.

I think it’s a neat option to have, but personally I would make it opt-in rather than opt-out

I personally prefer way the things they are now (show downvotes). I’m not quite sure what the reasoning would be to hide downvotes on a user’s own posts?

I think disabling downvotes totally for the user’s content by default would be a bad idea, because it is important for a user to know if what they are saying is unpopular.

Here’s an approach I have taken for my app (for all posts and comments).

• If downvotes are <= 5, downvotes show as 0.
• If downvotes <= 5%, downvotes show as 0.

Remember, the reasoning for this is a mere hypothesis and not results obtained from an experiment.

The 5 percent rule aims to prevent fringe opinions from downvoting. This solves issues like, “why do I have 3 downvotes on a picture of my cute puppy?”.

The 5 downvotes rule prevents downvoting bias. I have observed this happening on Reddit a lot. If a comment has 3 upvotes and 2 downvotes, people tend to downvote more (just because of the downvote counts and not the content itself). 2 downvotes in a 5 total votes sample size is too small to make any decision about the quality of content.

In my opinion, cases like these are where the downvotes serve more as a mental health destroyer rather than decentralised content moderation.

So to answer your question, I think having the current as default would be better, I.e., option “Show”. However, if you’re open to refine this even further, I would suggest the 5-5% idea.