When things work correctly, it matters. Right now lemmy's sorting system is bugged, so just using "new" is the best way to find content.

But, when it works, the upvotes and downvotes determine how much visibility a post is given. It's basically a way for us users to tell the site what content is good, and what content is bad. If you see a thread with interesting discussion, or that links a fun video, or features a pretty art piece, upvoting will help more people find it.

If you see someone link to misinformation, or push a conspiracy theory, you can downvote to the tell the system that it is bad content, and it will show it to less people going forward.

Voting creates a signal about the quality of a post so other users can rank posts based on the collective perspective. You don't vote for yourself, you vote to help other users.

A lot of interesting perceptions on the upvote system here.

It's another form of user moderation. Is the content relevant to the community you're in? Upvote it. Did it help you? Was it a thought-provoking comment chain? Upvote it, it might help others!

Is is irrelevant, such as a dog photo in a cat community for example? Downvote it! Rude comment or flamewar? Downvote it! If you still want to see it, now it's easily sorted at the bottom. :)

A lot of areas of this site, such as the comment section here, can be organized by these votes for your convenience and sanity. You can also identify potentially malicious links/suggestions based off the like/dislike ratio on a comment. A helpful tip is to hover over the number beside a comments time-stamp near the top of a comment. It'll display the full ratio!

I found this on Wikipedia:

Using a system of upvotes and downvotes users can influence what content appears at the top of the main feeds and of each community.

So if you find a post interesting, you can upvote it. And if someone posts cat pictures in asklemmy, you can downvote it, because it's off-topic and maybe you want to discourage such behaviour.

I'm not sure if Lemmy has upvote counters for users, but either way if you upvote a post or comment you say that it's useful/interesting, and it's a bit like a "thank you" in real life.

I've always liked Saidit's "two upvotes" system. It's so simple and creative, encouraging discussion rather than the mindless brigading that becomes so common with the vote wars for visibility.

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.

Its a way to prioritize which posts you are going to read. if there are only 10 posts you can read all of them, if there are 1000 maybe not, depends on how much time you have, but when people can vote on which posts they find interesting there is a good chance you will find the most voted interesting as well.

Upvoting a post releases the Good Chemicals in the brain. You do this when you would like the person who made this contribution to do more of that.

Downvoting, in turn, produces the Bad CHemicals. The downvote button was famously invented to replace the previous disincentivizing mehchanism, Hammers.

i can't believe you've asked this! user voting is everything! without it there's no way to meaningfully rank the content. i prefer to browser top-day posts because i only want to see what the majority of people have decided is worth seeing. surely you can imagine that browsing a randomly sorted list would be full of boring and uninteresting posts!

The intent is to rank whether something is a useful/meaningful/worthwhile contribution or not.