Is upvoting something the equivalent of choosing your underwear, though? I don’t think it is. It’s a public action.

It’s complaining that someone recorded your dick in those security cameras because you whipped it out to piss on the sidewalk.

It’s speech, and its effects are public. Wanting an activity where the consequences are public but the actors are not is just saying you don’t want there to be consequences for your actions.

Moreover, it’s an activity that is federated, which means if I want to know who’s upvoting posts, I can just spin up my own instance and see who’s doing it that way, just like with the other form of speech here. When you upvote something on Lemmy or kbin, when you favourite something on Mastodon, or when you use an emote reaction on other fediverse platforms, those are all sent as individual activities to following servers.

It’s all public, even if it’s not surfaced.

On the other side: Just because something is publicly viewable doesn’t mean you should have the right – ethical or legal – to do whatever you want with it. If you publish a book, should I have the right to scrape it for my AI projects? If so, where is the line that I cannot cross? Can I put it to music and record the whole thing as an album? Can I include the entirety of its text in an ad for toilet seats? It’s out there in the public, so clearly that means you’ve lost all rights to control what people do with it, right?

Where’s the line, and why do you think it’s at “updoots”?