[lh7]

Agree. Actually, just posted a related question a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13171928).

And if you're going to have votes, at the very least those should be public, as they are in some forums that I've come across and in some bug trackers.

Upvotes: the only point of those seems to be to serve as a form of "reward", like "badges" and the like, to entice those with an insecurity problem to seek some validation. The only ones benefiting from it are the site admins though, as people tend to generate more content in order to collect "upvotes". Note I said "more", not better quality. See Stackoverflow for example.