I'm very new here so this is said without much experience but my understanding so far is that the sats make you consider more before you comment (because there's a cost to comment, even if trivial), but also and probably more importantly, there is a cost to promote ('upvote') which is proportional to the amount of promotion. This is important because it doesn't reward 'lowest common denominator' appeal or groupthink nearly so much as we see on places like reddit. And on reddit, it used to be common to see ppl say "I wish I could upvote this more than once" to a comment or post they thought particularly valuable. On SN, you can upvote 'more than once' but at proportional cost.