this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2022
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I prefer it. It dissuades people from being mislead that a person's comment/opinion has a 100% approval rate. In an election, it would make little sense to exclude how many votes were cast against a winning candidate, as that is useful information in understanding how divided their beliefs are. One could argue that this can be observed through written disagreements expressed through replies, but more users express their opinions using the upvoted/downvote system than replying.
I think scores and seeing downvotes makes people less likely to feel that if they disagree with an opinion, they're alone in doing so.
There's been a number of threads I've replied to on Lemmy as a result of this. I see a highly upvoted comment I disagree with and wonder "is it just me, or...?" and then I see that several people have downvoted the comment, which just confirms I'm not the only one who disagrees. I then proceeded to reply and it sparked a richer discussion.
That said, I almost never downvote because in many ways I find it to be a weird form of silencing people.