Should "show scores" default to off?
I saw that setting and switched it off, and now reading through others' and my own comments is like walking on clouds. It's great!
Should this be the default and make everyone's lives here a tiny bit better?
I don't see that setting on my end. I don't think I'd want it off, but if having a switch option makes life better for some people I don't see a problem with it
I'd have to say no. That allows for hate speech, harassment, and general trolling to hold equal footing with otherwise civil conversation.
Good moderators on your instance should solve that, not just leave it up to the votes.
You can't always trust that the mods will - or even can - take any action, though. Especially due to the federated nature of things.
For instance, you and I are both commenting from different instances, on a post made on a third instance, by a user from a fourth instance. Who has power over who in this situation? Between you, me, and OP, none of us "belong" to the instance this thread is in. Who are the three of us supposed to be trusting to keep this place clean of that sort of content?
One could argue that that's just the inherent risk you take in using federated platforms, but I don't think that's too widely understood among the user base at large just yet. A simple user-maintained scoring system, even as rudimentary as Lemmy's implementation currently is, does a lot of heavy lifting in regards to filtering the good content from the bad.
I have things configured inverse to the way you do; upvotes and downvotes appear as two separate values next to all comments and posts for me.
I prefer this, because it allows me to get a more refined look at my fellow lemmy users palate for content.