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.
Up and down is interesting, ain’t it. I use UP to mean good point, great idea, I agree, etc. But I use DOWN differently: not for I disagree, don’t like, but “YOU ARE SHITTING UP OUR CULTURE HERE”, bigots and totally wrong facts that the poster insists on which is different than ‘the answer is X’ but its wrong, it’s Y, and you reply Y is the answer, we disagree, that’s fine, even if I’m annoyed etc. Downvoting to me is, you are not being a good citizen here, fuck you. A meta-comment on the posting.
Sometimes I fail, lol.