How it works: The voting system

Postive votes help to push posts up the rankings in lists of content, ensuring that the posts that have been most enjoyed by the community naturally get the highest exposure so they can be more easily found by other users. Author's of articles that have received a lot of positive votes in the past also gain more influence within the site, and their new posts are ranked more highly automatically.

If you feel that an article is of particularly low quality, you can also mark your displeasure by clicking on the negative voting button (the down arrow icon). Although the negative vote count is never displayed, and is not directly used in ranking, by showing which articles you feel are of particularly low quality, you can help the system to automatically optimize personal lists of content displayed to you. Negative voting may also slightly reduce the influence of the post's author within the site if you have previously voted positively on other posts they have created.