What is the point of voting in meta

Question

The voting in Askubuntu works as following:

you ask a good question, it gets upvoted and you get reputation
you give a good answer and it gets upvoted, you receive reputation

you ask a bad question, it gets downvoted, and you lose reputation you give a bad answer and it gets downvoted, you lose reputation

The reputation system works pretty good:

• It is pretty easy to gain reputation
• you see the reputation of others
• there are a lot of new users with 1 reputation on the site

following from that you get a feeling of being better then the other person, which automatically makes you want to ask good questions, not disrespect anyone(rep. loss), etc.

However in meta you don't receive reputation if asking a good question.
(i don't know about downvoting)
because of this the only purpose voting serves is ranking of questions, but you don't have a list of best ranked questions (they are shown sorted by time) and most people won't see the purpose of helping the community anymore.

So what point exactly does voting in Meta serve and why don't we gain reputation from upvotes? (should i add feature request?)

Answer 1

Meta isn't rep gaining. Never has been never should be.

The point of voting tends to be to show agreement or disagreement with a given thread or answer. There are many "make a collective decision" threads which exist and then general agreement or disagreement can be met through voting or such. That's the purpose really for votes on meta.

For feature requests it's the same general thing, in my opinion.

Meta should not affect your rep, either, in my opinion. It's a site about the main site. I think you should only gain rep for contributing to the main site, not contributing to a site about the main site.

If you really care, there's badges which you can earn for contributing here. However, your reputation should only be gained by contributions to the actual main site. Not meta.