To prevent them from engaging in bad behavior.
Socsa
So you can still ban the voting agent. Worst case scenario you have to wait for a single rule breaking comment to ban the user. That seems like a small price to pay for a massive privacy enhancement.
I don't think you do. Admins can just ban the voting agent for bad voting behavior and the user for bad posting behavior. All of this conflict is imagined.
This is literally already the Lemmy trust model. I can easily just spin up my own instance and send out fake pub actions to brigade. The method detecting and resolving this is no different.
It will be extremely obvious if you see 300 user agents voting but the instance only has 100 active users.
But if the only bad behavior is voting and you can that agent then you've solved the core issue. The utility is to remove the bad behavior, no?
Is that really harassment considering Lemmy votes have no real consequences besides feels?
You don't even need to message an admin. You can just ban the agent doing the voting.
Ok, then you can keep your votes public and other who don't want that have an option as well. Everyone is happy. There is no conflict here.
In addition to that, I guarantee you that meta and the like are already running data mining instances on here. Being publicly tied to votes is just more telemetry for the machine. I don't quite understand why people seem to think that is no big deal.
Who cares? Generating an infinite number of tokenized identities to facilitate ban evasion will just result in an instance getting defederated. This introduces no real risk as long as the instance is generally abiding by the rules.
Most of us here are fairly anonymous anyway. I dont think being able to add an additional layer of privacy to our activity is really a big deal.
It really isn't though. It is thermal noise.