I prefer to always see both numbers.

Size is what's important, direction is meaningless.

100 upvotes, hell yeah

100 downvotes, hell yeah

50 upvotes, 50 downvotes, hell yeah

0 votes, aw man

I hide both

Because we all want to be liked 😊

When you have more upvotes, "forget about the haters!"

When you (probably) were an asshole, "think about the people who do agree! You're not alone!"

No I don't care at all

This is presumably the logic other social media platforms applied when deciding to remove separate visibility of downvotes.

By just showing the aggregate, the poster usually gets to feel better about themselves and still see a positive score ("People like my post!") even if there are also some downvotes.

And so the poster keeps posting that sort of stuff.

From a commercial perspective this is good, especially because 'controversial' content with mixed upvotes and downvotes drives more engagement and more 'clicks'

Hopefully on lemmy we can stay free from that revenue-brained thinking given we have no profit motive, and keep scores transparent.

(It seems many Lemmy apps already show scores as just a merged aggregate however. Perhaps they simply copied the look of the big players, thought it looked 'tidier', or didn't even consider why it might be better if they didn't.)

I am frequently baffled by what people here downvote.

ETA: including this post.