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

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

I have to say I really appreciate not seeing downvotes when I am on hexbear I think they got a good thing going on over there.

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

To elaborate on why I'd like to add this, from the original issue:

This is to enable a user being able to still show downvotes for other people's posts/comments, but hide downvotes to their own content.

Adding this exception for your user alone, is to promote a positive experience, and for users to not have their mental well-being negatively affected by downvotes to their own content.

To mitigate the mental health negatives of downvotes, many instances already have downvotes entirely removed (meaning not only are downvotes not shown, but its impossible to downvote anything).

Disabling downvotes globally (not just for your user), has a lot of negatives, such as:

• Highly negative / low score comments seem to still be upvoted, and so encourage twitter-style rage-bait engagement (instead of just downvoting and moving on).
• These combative threads then keep getting bumped to the top of the active sort, making hostile comments seem the norm.
• You don't know which comments are actually unpopular or not, so like twitter, you have to "check the ratio", of replies to upvotes, to see if something is actually unpopular.

By making ShowForOthers default, we mitigate the downsides above, while also promoting positive mental health.

Just to clarify:

• This is not removing the ability to downvote.
• This is only about adding a setting to hide downvotes to your own content.
• Users can always re-enable showing downvotes to their own content at any time in their settings.

Yes. As a hexbear user where down votes are disabled I find the experience is much more enjoyable. Ideally down votes off would be the default for servers.

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.

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 was not aware of the issue that downvotes negatively affect mental health.

As others have said, I think it should be opt in instead of opt out, but it is probably good to have as an option.

However, if the intent is to improve mental health - I would recommend making it an option to hide all votes in their entirety. One can hide their down votes, but that may just change some peoples perspective from "high number of down votes" to "low number of up votes" which to them may be functionally the same as far as mental health is concerned. Therefore I think that it would be good to have the option for each/both.

For me this would have another benefit as well - it would allow me to think about and respond to all content in a more objective and honest manner.

I could see it being a "softer" way of a community enforcing good behavior, especially for things that don't rise to the level of mod action.

I'm not on an instance with (visible?) downvotes though, and I do think that makes me more comfortable voicing opinions.

The hexbear mods/admins will probably have gotten community feedback and done a poll, so might be worth checking with them?

Transparency everywhere should be the ultimate goal. Save the social engineering for the capitalists.

No

I really like that

You might as well. If it goes poorly then surely you can just get rid of it later, right?

You want to be more welcoming to the people who freak out about downvotes? The people for whom the slightest criticism is a huge problem?

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.

Sure. An off by default option would not hurt.

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.

I'm not sure there's a purpose to it the way things are clustered here. Particular for anything of a political/news nature the very same post on one instance and com may get a completely different reaction on another. There are a fair number of people that I think of as 'fire and forget posters' in that they simply fire off posts but rarely interact with them after. Making this the default would likely encourage more of the same behavior, possibly leading to more spam.

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.

Unpopular opinion, I know, but downvotes are an anti-feature, designed to excuse big, for-profit social media from actually moderating their platforms. They have no place in real social spaces.