I'm guessing but i want to say Preventing abuse and harassment are the reasons.
First of: the admin of your instance could see your votes even if the feature was "private". They just gotta query the database.
Example of harassment; you make many accounts and religiously downvote a certain user or community posts.
Example of abuse is even more clear; if the user voting on a post is not registered at all on the database then its literally impossible to prevent users from calling upvote or downvote 100 million times, rendering the feature useless.
My personal opinion is that the feature should be " opt in" on an instance basis, but idk man.
I'm guessing but i want to say Preventing abuse and harassment are the reasons.
First of: the admin of your instance could see your votes even if the feature was "private". They just gotta query the database.
Example of harassment; you make many accounts and religiously downvote a certain user or community posts.
Example of abuse is even more clear; if the user voting on a post is not registered at all on the database then its literally impossible to prevent users from calling upvote or downvote 100 million times, rendering the feature useless.
My personal opinion is that the feature should be " opt in" on an instance basis, but idk man.