That's not actually true. There's a reputation threshold (1000) to see how many downvotes the post has: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/established-user. Without that privilege one can only see the net votes.

I've argued against it in the past (since it's very important context to any reader) but to no avail. An upvote and a downvote rarely cancel each other out. They have different units and shouldn't be summed together. A score of 25 could mean the answer is perfect but has only seen moderate traffic, or incredibly dangerous but has seen high traffic.

Here's a good list of controversial answers on SO: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/466/most-.... They would mostly look like great answers from the net score.