My suggestion would be to downvote anything factually misleading, and to upvote anything for which you personally learned something from or had insight from. (Not agreement or disagreement). There are exceptions, as some threads (such as this one) are actually measuring agreement/disagreement, but that should be easy to determine.

I’m pretty sure I’m more proud of them than of all the work I did in high school put together.

I don't think that's not a good thing...there have been people in this community who attempted to drive out those they didn't like by downvoting everything they posted. The community would probably be better off without the downvote, since those who aught to use it do not and those who aught not to use it do. (Not to mention that some people unfortunately attach negative emotion to being downvoted, even though they haven't actually harmed anyone)