Yes, bias is a thing. Ever hear of the placebo effect? It gives people a bias before clicking the link.

In fact, showing rankings actually makes it easier for bots because of that bias, they just randomly click stuff to appear neutral, and upvote their target posts, which when they say +1.4k, you’ll be biased into thinking it’s a popular opinion. Hence why hiding them by default actually maybe has benefits. There are no advantages to seeing the votes other than abuse. Name some.

As you said, they’re already accessible, so there is no point of bloating the code. Let’s not make them even more so and encourage abuse.

What problem is being solved here by doing this?