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.
There’s been lots of discussion of this on kbin. I tend to like it. I think it encourages people to stop and think ‘why’ before they downvote things - compared to Reddit, where people tended to downvote thoughtlessly and often, and which contributed to a culture on some subs that was quite toxic.
Ironically Kbin might be the place where people will follow the downvote reddiquette correctly, something that almost never happened in Reddit itself:
So if we don’t like it . . . don’t . . downvote it?
Isn’t that, y’know, what the downvote’s for?
That’s cornfusing.
No? The votes are for what contributes (or not) to a conversation, and deepens the dialogue.
That’s why it’s infuriating when someone is downvoted when they have an unpopular but well-structured opinion, while a one-liner joke gets a million upvotes.
I’ll probably be a lot less likely to downvote here, just because if something is so inflammatory that I’d want to, I probably don’t want to draw their attention to me anyway. But I’m glad to know early on.