Up until a couple of days ago nobody could see negative sats next to their name. You can still see downsats in the details section:

It makes discourse worse.

By studying four large comment-based news communities, we find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioral changes that are detrimental to the community. Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such. Moreover, these authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community. In contrast, positive feedback does not carry similar effects, and neither encourages rewarded authors to write more, nor improves the quality of their posts. Interestingly, the authors that receive no feedback are most likely to leave a community. Furthermore, a structural analysis of the voter network reveals that evaluations polarize the community the most when positive and negative votes are equally split.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf

It's a small change, but big enough to deter downzap bandwagoning. The hope is that a downzap always comes from a reaction to the content, not to the downzaps themselves.