Afaik, if you're on the webpage of an instance, up votes and downvotes don't push things up or down to a viewer. For that, you need to hit another button to "boost" it up, and it only works for ups not downs.

But that's just what I understand from seeing people talking about it; I use Liftoff and it integrates the upvote and boost buttons so it is functionally no different than Reddit, in so far as it looks and feels to the user.

The "Active" and "Hot" sort methods still use the votes to gauge how high or down they appear on the page, but with much less weight than the "boost" option has.