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Users can have upvotes and downvotes disabled in settings so they are never see how many vote up or down.
In my mobile client I don't see down votes and I like it that way. Today I logged in on my desktop and saw them. So I went through my comment history laughing for a while. I think I was down voted the most when I had something negative to say about neoliberals.
I am unbothered being down voted and think generally that the whole upvote tally can lead to groupthink in general. Being able to disable viewing them is a good design choice that could be made better being site | instance wide.
As a social experiment I wonder how much we have become accustomed to internet points as a form of self validation. If a large whole instance was segregated for a month or two and had disabled the voting tally, what would the engagement look like? Is it all ego driven?
Totally agree with you in relation to groupthink and it's the main reason I have them disabled too. I don't like my opinion of a comment to be influenced by others before I've even finished reading it.
I like that lemmy lets you see the upvotes and downvotes separately rather than just an aggregate like Reddit has. It's hard to tell when you see something has 1 or zero votes what people generally think but it might turn out that you have 100 upvotes and 100 downvotes and it just happens to add up to zero but you hit on something that's actually deeply controversial. That info is nice to have.
That is a good argument. It was nice to see that some of my comments were not universally liked and that some kind of broke even.