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I like to believe the upvote is the possible side-effect of bookmarking a story.

• CarolineW 10y ago
  Sometimes a title, and perhaps first paragraph, look inviting, but you just don't have time right now, so you want to bookmark it and read it later. So you upvote it, come back later, use the "bookmark" that you put to find it, read it, and discover that it is, in fact, complete rubbish. It's happened to me more than once, and I find it annoying. But the most common use-case is that I upvote because I think it's a Good Thing(tm) to have on HN. In that case I really don't care that it's remembered. For me, bookmarking is a very occasionally useful side-effect of the upvote.