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

  • DessalinesEnglish
    12•11 hours ago

    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.
    • @deegeese@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1•4 hours ago

      I get why you want to add the option, but why are you proposing to change everyone’s settings by changing the default on something almost nobody changes?

      If you insist this is a better default, at least have the courtesy to only change the default for new users, and ensure any DB migrations don’t change existing users’ settings.