I’d rather it be transparent, or non-existent. Hexbear is nice, it has no downvotes, but some users like the ability to downvote for other instances. I think it could be on an instance to decide to implement it, but not for the “flagship” instance. Though, I’d prefer it be put to a vote. I think it has use cases for sure.

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

IMO framing this as a way to protect the feelings of the poster sets us up to debate how people should react to downvotes. That was my initial reaction, anyway. It’s not a productive discussion, too much judgement.

But there are heaps of other good reasons why you might want to just show a single number (upvotes minus downvotes), for everyone, not just when viewing one’s own content.

• cleaner, less cluttered UI
• simpler code?
• people don’t need to know how many downvotes a comment got (their own comments OR other people’s), all that really matters is the aggregate score

Reddit and PieFed both just show one number - the score - and it works fine. On PieFed you can hover your mouse over the score to get a tooltip that breaks it down into up and down but afaik no one cares.

If other people can see that I got downvoted a lot but I can’t then every little snarky comment about how many downvotes I’m getting is going to trigger extreme FOMO and the urge to turn the downvote hiding feature off. An unknown amount of downvotes is worse than knowing how many downvotes there are.

Why? Most posts that I’ve seen that have been downvoteed are because the comment in question is bad in some way. People who don’t realise that need a lesson in been appropriate.

What I would be in favor of, is downvotes been hidden to everyone to stop bandwagoning.

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?