Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I have used voting to hide posts as well. We need a button to mark posts as read so we can avoid upvoting/downvoting when we don’t want to. I’ve read through a lot if Lemmy’s backend code and there is a way to mark posts as read, they just need to add it to the UI.