It's supposed to be about relevance and moderation of abusive content, not agreement, but that's not usually the case.

I see the upvote and downvote count as an overall room temperature/vibe check.

Whenever votes are good everything's chill, otherwise if approaching <50% happiness then I recheck/reflect and look for where I could've done better.

You can't please everyone however most can still avoid making fools out of themselves by trying to learn and improve from past mistakes.

Using the upvote button to agree isn't a problem, but it's more of a problem to use the downvote as a disagree if you're actually engaging with the person to debate the topic since it in theory lowers the visibility of the original post and your own commentary.

I always liked the idea of having a "recommend post" button, and let the better stuff with more recommendations and replies rise to the top naturally. It also avoids the weird feeling in clicking an upvote/agree/like to a topic that you want to discuss but is negative.

Nobody's going to upvote shit takes, obviously.

If someone's being an asshole or an idiot, I'm going to downvote them.

If someone says something that needs saying, or that's interesting or funny, I'm going to upvote it.

Interesting to read the comments, I was unaware anyone gave mich if a shit about posts, let alone how others might vote on them. I mean I don't actually know anyone here.

I do hit the upvote occasioanly if a post was helpfu/usefull... to me. Conditioning is the only real explanation I have for that behaviour though.

If they were, they'd be called Agree and Disagree buttons.