I appreciate your response, even if my question was perhaps 50% rhetorical. Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest

I appreciate your response, even if my question was perhaps 50% rhetorical. Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here. You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling. So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational. I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.