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Downvotes aren't personal but they can come off as personal to lower rep users that aren't as used to the site and the mechanics of the site.
By making it appear that there is a downvote floor of zero to users that aren't as familiar with the site it allows them to not feel like they are being trashed on while allowing existing systems to work. Users with high enough rep can click to see the vote counts (as is already implemented) and do the math.
Before we look at this too closely, I want to be sure that we're doing our absolute best to set people's expectations based on what they're about to submit. I'd like to send better signal that something might not go so well way before voting happens. Scrutiny by people feels more inhuman than scrutiny by dumb machines, after all.
After that, once we're confident that we've got every reasonable measure in place to give folks a good idea of what we need and expect in a question, we need to look at an interface that encourages a bit more empathy - maybe edit if you can before down voting? Maybe something else?
If we change the software (and to an extent, culture) a bit, I think we'll then be talking about cases where all efforts failed, seeing what we could learn from those, and then ultimately making a more informed move.
It's definitely a problem and something we need to come back to, but I'd like to do it a little more thoroughly. If it looks like that's going to take forever, then perhaps ideas like this might make good short-term fixes as we reach the broader goal of folks having a better experience when the start.
Downvotes are meant to send a signal.
By hiding them, you take away the chance the user has to improve their post.
Bad idea.
This proposal would:
Prevent visitors and low-rep users from quickly determining which answers are terrible.
Reduce the usefulness of downvoting bad answers (since you can't flag them).
Make it more difficult for new users to realize there is a problem with their posts.
Send a message to new users that they need to be shielded from the community.
Give them a heart attack when they finally get enough rep and see the downvotes.
And what would this all be in exchange for?
This would largely defeat the point of downvotes on particularly bad questions. Remember, votes aren't just for users to feel good about their own posts or realize their answer is not ideal. Votes are supposed to tell people who don't even have an account about the quality of a question or answer. Imagine someone searching security-related information online and stumbling across a Stack Exchange site. One answer, explaining the solution, is +1 while the other, giving dangerous advise which can result in a security breach, is -4. The person stumbling on this would not immediately realize that one of the answers is very, very wrong. They would think it is fine!
If users unfamiliar with a particular subject are unable to tell the difference between a new or neutral answer from a heavily-downvoted answer, the advice to downvote bad or dangerous answers rather than flagging them for deletion (after all, flags should not be used to point out inaccuracies) is pointless for everyone but the regular users. Before I registered, I can't tell you how many times I've seen an answer and known that it was wrong because it was downvoted.
The voting system is bad enough as it is (low-rep users and visitors will think that a highly-controversial +9/-7 answer merely got 2 upvotes). Making it more difficult for such users to quickly tell if an answer is incorrect would make the site less useful for new users.
What do we really need to do? We need to make downvotes less personal. Create a notice explaining what a downvote is and linking to various help resources, explaining how to improve their post and why it may have been downvoted. We already have rep capped so it cannot go negative, since overall rep is not as important to the community for determining the quality of a given answer. This allows new users who do not understand the site to recover from a few bad initial answers.
Perhaps an alternative solution, if new users, despite being adults, need to be handled with kid gloves, would be to cap visible downvotes at -1 (perhaps shown as < 0). This would be visible only to the owner of the post. Everyone else (including other low-rep users and guests) would be able to see the full vote. A link to the FAQ could be shown to the owner of the post.
I do not ever want to have to leave a comment on a -8 answer along the lines of:
I know you can't see it yet and think no one voted, but your answer actually has 8 downvotes. You might want to improve your answer (and soon, because most people do not retract their downvotes!) before you risk getting suspended.
Full disclaimer: I'm a developer at Stack Overflow. I understand what you're trying to get at, and it's an issue I think and care a lot about.
As others have pointed out, downvotes are largely meant to communicate that a post is not of high quality, and that is something important to communicate. I don't think hiding a negative score on a post is quite what you want here.
However, instead of removing that communication altogether, downvotes and what they intend to communicate could be framed better. In other words, we should do our best to communicate why a post is low-quality and also what could be done to improve it, possibly before a downvote is cast.
Right now, low-rep users who aren't familiar with the culture and the rules of Q&A who get downvoted without much explanation probably feel like they're being told: "Your post is bad and you should feel bad." Having an explanation about why that post is bad, such as in comments or some other mechanism, might communicate: "Your post is bad and you should feel bad for these reasons..." Having an explanation first before a user is penalized, either by being downvoted or being shown downvotes, might communicate what we want: "Your post is bad and before you feel bad, here's what you could do to improve..."
A feature or set of features that has this in mind may be what we're looking for.
