First of all I want to extend a warm welcome to anyone new here. I'm an OG Poal user who is very excited to watch this site suddenly grow up in front of my very eyes. Now that you goats and ruqqers (ruqqas?), have been here a couple weeks I figure you have a pretty decent grasp on most of the basic site features. But I wanted to bring up one of the finer points many of you new guys may not have figured out (based on some behavior I've noticed). As you probably know, the downvote button is intended to only be used for spam, and we try to discourage its use as an "I disagree" button. However, the upvote button, when used incorrectly, functions similarly to a downvote, moving all other posts *down* in the queue relative to that post that was upvoted. This effectively amounts to a silencing tool when abused. Imagine if a malicious group of users, for example, only gave one upvote to one post, effectively brigading the entire site. Therefore, it's encouraged to upvote regularly in order to avoid mass targetting the posts that you didn't upvote. In addition to encouraging this good practice through our site culture, we also employ an algorithm that detects whether a user isn't upvoting enough posts. If suspicious activity of this nature is detected, the algorithm randomly starts moving the offending users' posts to different subs. So if you're wondering why your post in /s/news suddenly got moved to a smaller and infrequently trafficked niche sub, it may actually be that you haven't been upvoting enough and you triggered the algorithm. That said, don't feel like you have to upvote every post. Upvoting is not compulsory. We're just looking for that happy medium where your upvote activity isn't hurting other users or the site's functioning. And honestly if you're at least upvoting a majority of posts like you should be, you're not even going to know this feature exists. I understand this may not be what you're used to where you came from, but I'm sure the honest among you can at least see why this was done and agree it makes sense. If anyone has any questions please PM my assistant, @AOU.