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: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
Yes, you do have to be an admin but you can be an admin on ANY federated instance, which is a piece that most people likely won’t consider. Admins aren’t an elite group of hand selected staff with background checks. I’m just some shmuck who knows how to format a proper docker compose file and query a database.