I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case for some people. I would want to be known for my good memes (not that I have many)

I think of upvotes and downvotes like "steering." Towards and away from the front page.

Ideally, everyone would use upvotes mainly for steering the best memes on the site towards imgflip's front page, for the sake of the quality of the site, and downvotes mainly for keeping memes they don't want to see on the front page away from there.

At least, that's how I see it.