I think it would be nice if you can actually see your image's reception better.

I agree! I'd like to see the votes both ways my memes get.

I'm not sure why they took it away (maybe they felt like it was encouraging downvote trolls, if they could see the effect they were having).

It's mainly the way people react. Many people get extremely worked up and make a huge fuss if they see a lot of their stuff get downvoted, regardless of whether the downvotes were merited or even whether the downvotes affect the ranking of their image (the system automatically ignores some downvotes due to alts, spam, attacks, etc). I totally agree seeing them would be ideal, but social networks are strange things that motivate strange rules. Trolls take advantage of seeing people get worked up over downvotes, turning it into an even bigger fuss. Regardless, upvotes are more important in all aspects including ranking, so it's not too bad of a thing to hide the downvotes counts.

Oh, so long story short, the few pussies who cry over it dictate the whole thing.

Got it.

Maybe they could add it to the stats page where only the owner can see it.

They took it out at the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016.

Thanks for the explanation 👍

Maybe they found it unnecessary.

On many sites down votes have become invisible for a very easy reason. They always lead to flame wars, and some even taking very extreme forms. With invisible downvotes at least the stats and rankings are still affected by them, but no senseless fights could come from that. That's the basic theory. It's also for this reason that on several communities you cannot even downvote at all... Only give things a like... Heck that's also how Facebook works...

Flame wars here are already bad as it is. I think this site needs a bigger moderation team, TBH.

Maybe, but at the same time, when you have something that make flame wars inevitable, no moderation team can stop that. Of course, you can never rule out the chance of a flame war. If you've seen the "discussion" about Donald Trump, you can see how passion for or against him can lead to fierce anger and in the end flame wars (and it doesn't matter if Trump is good or bad, I'm just saying how the discussions go), but then again, Trump is about politics, and then you can find reasons why people are passionate, fights about something as trivial as downvoting are downright terrible for a moderator to judge (trust me, I'm experienced in these matters), as then the source of the fight is hard to pinpoint, and the fights can then easily become a fight on their own with eventually no pinpoint to what started it all. Also downvotes are also often used as a childish method to publicly embaras somebody you hate. When these are invisible, troll downvotes do decrease (what is the point if the person you hate will never find out), and as they often go unnoticed a lot of trouble is prevented. In the end it does work out for the better...

Yeah. I see what you mean.