I decided I was going to tweak the design of the bar to be less attention-grabbing. My first thought was to just remove the border and padding, so that it fell in lockstep with the information text and quote button. I then realized that when I looked at a post, my very first instinct was to check its ratings. The little icons grabbed my attention immediately, so I hid them. I continued to feel my eyes being pulled to rating text, though, even without the icons.
This led to an epiphany: the biggest problem with ratings is that they tell you how to feel before you read a post. If you go to reddit and check the front page, you are basically being told that "this is important and matters to people". If you're on the forums and see something marked autistic and dumb, your brain adjusts to expect a shitpost, making it less likely to take it seriously. Even in the old system, if a post had a billion likes, you were more likely to like it yourself simply because everyone else had.
So now they're hidden by default. To see ratings, you have to mouse over the post. We'll see how this goes.
Seriously enough for a photoshop.
