Upvoting turns out to be a political act. Conformity is a powerful pressure on humans beings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Believing that no one shares your views can dis-empower those views; but seeing that you are not alone, or in the majority can reverse this pressure.
I'm a non-conformist in general, but, as a small illustration, I've noticed that my interpretation of a post/submission can be influenced by how many votes it has.
It certainly opens up the possibility of social sites gaming their votes, for various reasons, and this propaganda would be more effective than outright censorship. It seems likely that the state-approved social sites in China already do this. I don't see any measures to guarantee that the voting scores on reddit, facebook etc. are legitimate, and of course they're not, being easily gamed. But there's also no guarantee against deliberate manipulation - and it seems to be quite common to do so, at least in the early stages of a social site startup.
tl;dr guaranteeing the legitimacy of upvotes on social sites may become more important
I've noticed myself upvoting comments based on other upvotes, then finishing reading the comment only to realize that I wouldn't have upvoted it if I'd read the whole thing...
I'm a non-conformist in general, but, as a small illustration, I've noticed that my interpretation of a post/submission can be influenced by how many votes it has.
It certainly opens up the possibility of social sites gaming their votes, for various reasons, and this propaganda would be more effective than outright censorship. It seems likely that the state-approved social sites in China already do this. I don't see any measures to guarantee that the voting scores on reddit, facebook etc. are legitimate, and of course they're not, being easily gamed. But there's also no guarantee against deliberate manipulation - and it seems to be quite common to do so, at least in the early stages of a social site startup.
tl;dr guaranteeing the legitimacy of upvotes on social sites may become more important