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, I personally 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.
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.
Downvote if you agree.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort for a few shitty folks to silence people they hate by quickly down voting anything that comes from a small instance. While the instance that I know of disabled the downvotes to improve the experience for users of their instance, I don’t see their stuff in the All feed very often so they are probably still being silenced outside their instance.
Imagine being so fragile that you can’t even accept that some people live a different way to you and wanting them shut down as a result.