I don't upvote many articles. From time to time during the day I go through the "new" articles, and I'll upvote a few articles that I'd like to see on the front

I don't upvote many articles. From time to time during the day I go through the "new" articles, and I'll upvote a few articles that I'd like to see on the front page. They usually relate to programming or general science topics. I upvote comments that I think are strong contributions to the discussion. Simple enough. HN has enough quality participants that I often find several comments per article to upvote. I tend to save my downvotes for comments that are overly snarky or pedantic, as I think we see a bit too many of those sorts of comments on HN, and I reward them with downvotes.