Just a reminder that votes should be considered public, because anyone can gain access to them by either setting up their own lemmy server or moving to another federated service that displays them upfront (kbin/mbin)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md#vote-privacy

That's one of the things that I don't like about Lemmy. But unless there's better service that's not centralized I guess I will remain here for at least some time.

Never assume anything you do on servers you don't own are private. In fact don't even do it then, encrypt that shit.

Tying votes to accounts is pretty much required by the way activity-pub works; an upvote is basically the same as a heart/like on old Twitter and with federation it needs to know where the vote is coming from and where it’s going.

Piefed has an option to try to circumvent this by creating a second, “fake” account with no obvious connection to your own account and sends all your votes using that account. If the instance doesn’t have many accounts, though, it can still be obvious who’s voting.

As others have mentioned, other front ends or services can show the votes publicly to anyone who wants to see it. Even on other platforms that use a voting system one should always assume the votes are tied to one’s account.

What if you voted but then un-voted? Is that visible?

Users can do this too via the website lemvotes.org.

It's also a feature of Tesseract (but isn't as easy to use).

Literally everyone can see how anyone votes. Others have mentioned lemvotes already.

To be fair, I have a small handful of troll accounts that I tag and downvote whenever I see them posting. Sometimes they go on a posting tangent and I end up with a string of downvoting which looks bad without context

A bot that reveals that behaviour to the community would be very helpful.

Voting is kind of lame IMO. I wish it would die with Reddit. Large or small votes, my feed always seems to still be what it is, and I don't filter by votes or anything like that. Don't pay it much attention other than to maybe acknowledge the person above me.

Actually if my local community subreddit taught me anything, I've often got more in common with the downvoted folks.