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?
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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
ShowForOthersdefault, 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.
You want to be more welcoming to the people who freak out about downvotes? The people for whom the slightest criticism is a huge problem?
You’re conflating downvotes with criticism. Also if there’s no downvotes you’re more inclined to comment (and criticize) because you can’t lazily downvote
The people for whom the slightest criticism is a huge problem?
I mean, it’s .ml, so of course
I was not aware of the issue that downvotes negatively affect mental health.
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 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.
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’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.
Based on the feedback here, I’ve changed the PR to have
Showbe the default, and its been merged.ShowForOthersis still an option, just not the default.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?
IMO framing this as a way to protect the feelings of the poster sets us up to debate how people should react to downvotes. That was my initial reaction, anyway. It’s not a productive discussion, too much judgement.
But there are heaps of other good reasons why you might want to just show a single number (upvotes minus downvotes), for everyone, not just when viewing one’s own content.
- cleaner, less cluttered UI
- simpler code?
- people don’t need to know how many downvotes a comment got (their own comments OR other people’s), all that really matters is the aggregate score
Reddit and PieFed both just show one number - the score - and it works fine. On PieFed you can hover your mouse over the score to get a tooltip that breaks it down into up and down but afaik no one cares.
If other people can see that I got downvoted a lot but I can’t then every little snarky comment about how many downvotes I’m getting is going to trigger extreme FOMO and the urge to turn the downvote hiding feature off. An unknown amount of downvotes is worse than knowing how many downvotes there are.
