Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences

Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don’t get negative experiences you don’t get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

No

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.