Comment: I thought about this too

and I personally don't want to clutter everywhere with numbers, and had to redo the current voting widget to display the sum (+&-) to my liking. The drupal-provided both-sums widget is on the bottom here. Maybe I should just make an efficient tiny version of that.

You're probably someone who likes numbers. I am too, but I bet most here aren't.

The opposite argument, which I also thought someone would bring up, is that there should be no numbers at all, to minimize preconceptions and let people vote more "freely".

But you're right: contentious subjects appear innocuous in the current view.

As for view count...I haven't even looked into that. I think fake viewcounts are easy to count, and valid viewcounts are hard (that is, server-intensive) to keep credible. It could also answer the basic question "do people care", though. I'll look into it.