What is the purpose of upvoting on Reddit?

Upvoting on Reddit serves to indicate that a user finds a post or comment valuable, interesting, or relevant. This positive feedback helps good content rise to the top of subreddits and users' feeds, increasing its visibility to a wider audience. Conversely, downvoting signals that content is not valuable or relevant, pushing it down. This system is central to Reddit's community-driven content curation. Purchasing a product is done through external links or ads, not upvotes. Reporting a post is for content that violates rules, and hiding a post is a personal action to remove it from one's own view, neither of which is the purpose of upvoting.