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.
Ironically Kbin might be the place where people will follow the downvote reddiquette correctly, something that almost never happened in Reddit itself:
So if we don’t like it . . . don’t . . downvote it?
Isn’t that, y’know, what the downvote’s for?
That’s cornfusing.
No? The votes are for what contributes (or not) to a conversation, and deepens the dialogue.
That’s why it’s infuriating when someone is downvoted when they have an unpopular but well-structured opinion, while a one-liner joke gets a million upvotes.
No, that’s never what downvotes were for. It’s not a ‘disagree’ button. It’s just that Reddit got a bit toxic as it grew and the masses started treating it that way.