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

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 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.

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.