tl;dr - think of upvotes as "watch later" button (YouTube), or "add to reading list" checkbox (Quora). do not use it as a "like/react" button (Facebook), or "Upvote" (Quora).<p>The way I use HN is this - I browse the Front Page and the "new" section as often as I can. I go through a couple of pages (as permitted by time) for both sections and upvote those that are relevant to whatever I may be learning at the time. Anything I upvote (threads and comments) are saved, providing me with easy access to all of the information within vicinity.<p>This is the most useful thing about HN, this ability to collect knowledge in an organized manner with possibly most minimal effort. And I am afraid that most of us do not realize this.<p>If it was so (that we use upvotes similar to how we use bookmarks) - then I personally would expect to see a broader distribution of votes among topics that would parallel the necessarily broader range of interests in any large collection of human beings.<p>Instead, we observe a centralized tendency where predictable topics garner hundreds of votes, while most languish with 1 or 2. This is a result of muscle memory from using Facebook's like button.<p>I'll try to make time and add some visual evidence of this in a few months using HN's API.