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.
Still unexpected. And that’s the problem.
Comments are obviously public because I can read them. But there is no “upvoted by xx people (and downvoted by xx)” link I can click to see the list of people who interacted this way with the post. It’s only with API calls or similar that I can access the information.
In case of pitchforks: I downvoted this comment because it’s a duplicate, not because it’s bad.
Most of my downvotes on lemmy has been for this reason.