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 suppose, but then they’re going to look up illicit content on said account in the hopes of framing you for a crime? That’s quite a stretch.
I was just providing a scenario that came to mind. I am sure many exist outside the one I described.
Nobody has mentioned crime, so I am not sure where that came from. Accountability can come in many forms, and often on the internet users will be banned or excluded based on their direct actions. However, if views were public, it would be trivial to setup a bot to autoban users from communities before they even join, based solely on what they’ve seen.