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.
Well, yeah, it’s put on the database.
It’s the only way to avoid double voting from the same account or to remove the reverse vote if one changes one’s mind and votes the other way.
Did you think that it was any different on Reddit and that no random employee with access to their database could run a similar SQL query with a couple of joins and end up with nicknames, e-mails and IP addresses?!
Do you know who are the Reddit employees with access to their database or a copy of it? Have you had a chance to vet them? I don’t think so.
At least here it’s a bit more transparent.
The only shocking thing in this is that anybody is shocked by it.
Remove voting! End this dumb mob mentality!