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.
Yeah, and guess what? They can do that to you.
Effectively, every single person can use a bot that will automate the blocking of any user that ever downvotes them ever.
Like if I made a post that says I like Nazis, and then waited for the downvotes to pour in. Add every single one of those names to a block list, share that block list with all of my alts and all of my friends, and suddenly you have a whole army of Nazi sympathizers that are invisible to the users that would downvote them.
These hand waving excuses about votes being public are really lacking imagination. This is extremely abusable information, and cursory tools can will be put together to make abusing them simple.
I think there are some problems about voting being public. I don’t think this is one of them.
I don’t mind people blocking me, and if I don’t appreciate the type of content people provide I’ll block them liberally. It’s not necessarily anything personal, I’m just cirating my experience.
Furthermore, I strive to be on instances where nazi sympathisers would be banned, and where instances tolerating them would be defederated. The only issue is identifying and weeding out troll accounts.
You wouldn’t know that your instance is infested with tankies and fascists. You can’t see their posts because you’re on the block list.