

Indeed.
Although the private voting feature isn’t all that effective. First of all it doesn’t work with trusted instances (which includes many of the big ones), and secondly it only obscures the voter identity, it doesn’t completely randomize it.
See these posts for context.
https://piefed.social/post/408115#post_replies
https://piefed.social/post/205362#comment_2496068
I don’t necessarily think these limitations are a bad thing, because totally private voting could theoretically be a vector for bad actors to manipulate the visibility of content on the fediverse. This solution provides some protection for the average user but also makes it possible for admins to identify vote manipulation if it becomes a problem.
They do have a history of removing threads and posts that get too popular though. I remember several incidents where highly upvoted comments and posts about Lemmy got removed for seemingly no reason.
It’s probably impossible for them to entirely prevent discussion about Lemmy so they instead astroturf and try to manipulate the discussion to portray the platform in a bad light. It seems to be an extremely effective tactic, unfortunately for us.
Reddit’s obfuscation of upvotes and downvotes is problematic, and makes it trivial for them to manipulate any discussion if they feel like it. Not to mention their ability to just nuke anything they don’t like with no repercussions.