Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I only downvote awful/hateful comments so I usually stand by what I strike down. I can understand why this may concern others though.
Kind of a bummer for anti-dictator memes. People might have thought they could maintain anonymity by upvoting without commenting. Better to not engage with it at all.
Maybe it will encourage us to downvote only those comments that don’t contribute to the conversation, and not every comment we disagree with. Like how Reddit was supposed to be until it turned into a shouting match.
No chance