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.
People might ask you to provide context for your down vote.
Recently somebody got butthurt about being called out on it.
I think the feature is nice because you can spot shill ops, as those accounts travel in packs.
New articles for politicians are pretty obvious about it but so are generic karma farmers. Although I am not sure why farm karma on here.
People can certainly ask about reasons for voting, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to provide the answer. Nobody is entitled to know a person’s reason for voting on posts except for that person themselves.
People might also ask you to provide further justification of your comment. In both cases you can either engage in a civil manner, tell them to eat a bag of dicks or just ingore.
They can ask, and I can tell them to fuck right off. Simple.