Well, you can trade them in for air miles.

>.....................................................................

Points are where all the mayhem begins.

I used to use Voat quite a lot, because I was attracted to its big marketing push about "non-censorship". In reality however, Voat is a place where the banned cultures of Reddit inevitably transition to, and since Reddit (like most successful social media sites) employs left-leaning policies, this unfortunately has resulted in Voat being saturated with far right political trolls.

Now, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem if far right political trolls were prepared to engage in fair debate, but of course they are ideologues and as such are not interested in truth or reason. Hence, after only a few hours using the site I began to notice that all of my comments were being parade-downvoted. Moreover, I also noticed a kind of inverse square relationship between how reasonable (or perhaps persuasive) each of my contributions were and how many downvotes they were receiving.

Of course, this behaviour was intended to deprecate and demoralise me from using the site to express my views, and by no means was it personal to me either. Many left-leaning contributors were experiencing exactly the same dedicated attacks, to the point that eventually almost all of them left the site.

So what did I do?

Well, since I am anankastic when it comes to fairness, truth and reason, I decided not to let them win. Instead, I spent several weeks creating hundreds of alt accounts with which to play them at their own game. It gave me an immense feeling of satisfaction that, once I had figured out the popularity formula, I was able to catapult my own threads and comments straight to the top of the page in as little as 30 seconds, and then proceed to keep them there all night, on my own, while being systematically downvoted by a parade of far right trolls intent on demoralising me either to the point of leaving the site or hanging myself.

And how do you think they reacted?

The same way they reacted when I did it here.

They grouped together and began bombarding the site owner with complaints about how I was abusing the system. Nevermind that the entire reason I was doing it was to counter their own abuse of the system. The notion of raging double standards is of course lost completely on the standard far right troll, who thinks systematic abuse is only an offence if someone you don't like/agree with is doing it.

The moral of the story is that, since points are used to determine the placement or perceived importance of a comment, they are therefore wide open to abuse.