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 think it would be possible not to tie up/down votes to a particular user and still be able to allow votes, but you would probably need to disallow changing a vote (unless there are some fancy uses of cryptography I don’t know about). You could use a bit field to indicate whether or not a particular user voted on a particular post, whether up or down doesn’t matter. You could register the up/down count to the table that has the post id and not tie it to the user that voted. But then a user couldn’t change their vote because of that arrangement.
I don’t personally care how my votes are recorded, I just like databases.
Yeah now that you wrote about it and I thought about it, yeah there is a way to have both. But as you’ve said it would remove the ability to change votes, and I don’t feel like thinking further into this to solve this problem. I just don’t care that much :P