People who get bothered about downvotes, don't understand how to use social media.
I used multiple social media platforms and I can say in medium confidence that downvotes are almost useless to see for users.
They are made to influence the algorithm and that's it, if you are really bothered by them it's because you saw something you were never intended to see.
Reddit try to communicate this by showing you only one number for the total score and they are trying to not show you if your post score became in negative.
Matter of fact, personally I find downvotes pretty refreshing for me because I expect to hear something I don't know or a passionate criticism on my opinions or posts.
I think what could discourage me from posting is the lack of comments, not the downvotes.
I personally currently disable showing upvotes and downvotes in my client.
Note: If you are really bothered about downvotes, you can disable showing down votes on the web client and in the mobile clients by changing that option in the settings.
If you're bothered by social media votes, you need to go outside more.
Social media isn't real. It's a poor simulacrum of human interaction. Find real human beings to interact with and whatever they think of you, tell you, or how they treat you in your face matters.
But whatever people become and how they behave once they hide behind a screen and cast simplistic one-bit click-clicks to express complex human feelings and opinions doesn't.
Create a browser extension like return YouTube dislike, but for Lemmy.
Pay someone to downvote my post.
Get outside your house at night and scream "I hate you Joker!", hopefully the local news will cover it and then I would hear it and I would know that was you.
That means that whatever downvotes you will get, I could still see your post.
I am sure that I am not the only one who does this as I first learned of this option on another social media website called Tildes by a user comment and since then it had become the default for me in all the social media websites I use.
It's human nature for people to feel upset by their message being undermined.....but they should be able to get over it.
The bigger problem I have is that the downvoters don't know how to USE downvotes. Instead of downvoting inaccurate content or engaging in any reasoning, people just downvote what they personally don't like and disagree with. Which is bullshit.
I admit to posting shitty comments sometimes, just because I feel some adversity is nice. Lemmy seems pretty uniform, politically. That just annoys me. So I get a fair share of downvotes. In general, I don't take online discussions in comment sections too seriously, though. I mean, you can't expect people there to actually research and listen to arguments. It mostly seems like emotional venting/searching for confirmation of your bias to me.