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.

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?

There are probably a variety of mindsets that will do it.

For me, I think it was just really wanting to get away from being under the boot. Get away from the walled gardens. Like that feeling after using LinkedIn, except for the OS. Hearing the call of freedom, authenticity and humanity.

Cool, but now SSH into a remote server and then try to open nano. It doesn’t.

After using it for 3 weeks I concluded that as Kitty breaks the fundamentals all the nice shiny isn’t worth it.

I lived in PH for years during Duterte and have direct experience too. I understand why he is so popular and why his supporters are completely wrong.

No, it didn’t work and the perpetrators admitted so themselves.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-drugs-performance-exclusi-idUSKBN2010IL/

https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/manila-times/20190404/281483572747957

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/philippine-president-dutertes-drug-war-an-utter-failure-says-vice-president