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submitted 1 day ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

There is a pull request which adds a new setting show_downvotes with these settings:

  • Show (current behaviour)
  • Hide (all downvotes hidden in ui)
  • ShowForOthers (only downvotes on other user's posts are visible)

Importantly the last option would become the new default, which means that users wont be aware that their post or comment was downvoted unless they manually change the setting. This may be good for mental health, but may also make it harder for users to realize that their content is unpopular. What do you think about it?

Here is the pull request

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[-] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 23 hours ago

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.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 2 points 22 hours ago

Reddit hiding vote totals was the first sign it’s heading to shit.

this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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