I prefer to always see both numbers.
Size is what’s important, direction is meaningless.
100 upvotes, hell yeah
100 downvotes, hell yeah
50 upvotes, 50 downvotes, hell yeah
0 votes, aw man
Oh yea 0 votes is so sad… I wonder if federation is broken or I got shadowbanned or something…
I think the thing is not about the score, its just an affirmation that, yes, someone in the world did hear you and you didn’t decrease the lifespan of your keyboard for no reason…
But I’d rather have a “read by [X] Users” stat that is neutral, rather than a negative stat like a downvote…
Getting downvoted feels like when you were in K-12 school and the entire class bullying you
Because we all want to be liked 😊
When you have more upvotes, “forget about the haters!”
When you (probably) were an asshole, “think about the people who do agree! You’re not alone!”
This is presumably the logic other social media platforms applied when deciding to remove separate visibility of downvotes.
By just showing the aggregate, the poster usually gets to feel better about themselves and still see a positive score (“People like my post!”) even if there are also some downvotes.
And so the poster keeps posting that sort of stuff.
From a commercial perspective this is good, especially because ‘controversial’ content with mixed upvotes and downvotes drives more engagement and more ‘clicks’
Hopefully on lemmy we can stay free from that revenue-brained thinking given we have no profit motive, and keep scores transparent.
(It seems many Lemmy apps already show scores as just a merged aggregate however. Perhaps they simply copied the look of the big players, thought it looked ‘tidier’, or didn’t even consider why it might be better if they didn’t.)
No I don’t care at all
I am frequently baffled by what people here downvote.
ETA: including this post.
