I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn’t. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don’t want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you’re revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you’d have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
What can they use that data for?
It would only be usable data if they could show personalized ads to the users. They can’t.
All they know is that Meldrik up/downvoted this and that, but outside of Lemmy they have no idea who Meldrik is.
I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn’t. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don’t want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you’re revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you’d have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
If you think metadata is worthless, I would like to make you aware about Snowden and his revelations. Look them up.