tl;dr - I think this would be a bad decision.

Long version:

I think that exposing all nodes reputations to everyone would be the way to go.

A node's reputation is currently invisible until a vote is cast for it - except for those listed in Best Nodes, and Worst Nodes for logged-in users, which is unaccessible to Anonymous Monk.

So, Best Nodes shows node tallies even to Anonymous Monks, while the negative counterpart is hidden from them.

I guess that this policy is meant to prevent the decision on how to vote on a particular node from being biased by the node's actual tally; and to prevent Anonymous Monk to add negativity upon negativity (in the sense of further trolling and flaming). Furthermore, presenting nodes without their reputation avoids prejudice and places the burden to make an educated decision on voters, making it impossible for them to follow the "main stream" based on a number.

Which burden they already have, and showing a node's gathered votes doesn't take away that. In all my time on PerlMonks there only have been a few cases where I cast a vote and was revealed a contrary number after the fact, which prompted me to re-read and reconsider the node. In even less circumstances I would have chosen otherwise after that, and then I wished to have a chance to re-cast the vote. After all, these votes ain't for an election and, the same way as we are allowed to edit nodes after the fact, we should be able to express changes of opinion or educatedness or whatelse with our thumb ups or downs later.

So, in short, these points:

• hiding negatively reputed nodes goes against free speech
• I trust in anyone I don't know to make an educated guess about a nodes value the same way as I do
• if showing any node's reputation is perceived as nudging, so is showing only Best Nodes to Anonymous Monk and hiding nodes being voted upon negatively
• susceptibility to nudging is a personal choice, and if it isn't for somebody, there's nothing we can do about that
• the perl monks endured people like Intrepid, sundialsvc and others with great patience and no harm done to the community
• OTOH being presented with a node's title and its negative reputation could probably prevent somebody from opening its body, which could be a loss for them in one way or another, unfair, preventing free speech etc - but it is up to anybody themselves what to do being presented with a bit of information, and how to react

So - don't hide bits of public discussion, rather reveal more bits to it. Privacy is a whole different thing I want to add, just in case.

In any case, I think that adding "this node has negative reputation" to, rather than hiding a node, would be a better choice. We are constantly educating ourselves and others and, if necessary, by bad example also.

updates: corrections in speling and such

update:

Hiding subtrees: Don't! because answers and discussions to/about a bad node might contain valuable information and interesting subthreads worth reading.