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?
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.
How would it encourage the behavior? If they fire and forget, they aren’t looking at downvotes anyway.
More a speculative thought, but if those who do pay attention to negative feedback no longer see any, they may not take that into consideration when they put things up.
Say someone put up a post, saw no backlash on the front end, but then comes to look at the responses and sees a cesspit of hate. That’s hardly going to soften any mental harms it might otherwise impose.
Another thought here is messing about with such things, particularly in making them a default behavior, could disrupt comms where there is a strong voting aspect to it. The ‘am I the asshole’ type place that, despite the usual attempt to have them adjudicated by some nuanced comment system, inevitably end up using votes as a agree/disagree dynamic.