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.
Then either up or down votes would cease to exist, the website has to somehow differentiate between those votes to properly count them.
Cease (just trying to help)
Not being a native english speaker moment
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