Welcome aboard @kate9981! I'm very glad to see people new people who've been onboarded by LeoFinance!
Some people's upvotes are indeed worth more than those of others. LeoFinance is a decentralized application built on the Hive blockchain, which has a reward system of its own. The value of each user's upvotes depends on how many staked tokens they have. Staking means making your liquid tokens non-transferable in exchange for voting power. That procedure is also called powering up. Staked or powered up tokens can also be powered down. But it takes four weeks to power down LEO. Hive Power takes 13 weeks to power down back into liquid HIVE. HIVE is the main currency on this platform and Hive Power is what gives a user voting power to be used in chain governance among other things.
The upvoting system is quite simple when it comes to LEO. You decide what percentage of your voting power, the upper limit of which is determined by your stake, you use each time you vote on a piece of content. Each vote depletes your available voting power, which replenishes at a constant rate. You can give 10 full-power votes per 24 hours while keeping up with the rate at which your voting power replenishes.
There are many more tokens other than LEO or the main token HIVE. LEO is one of the so-called Tribe tokens and LeoFinance is one of the Tribes, which are communities focused on a particular subject matter. Votes using staked Tribe token power are transactions sent to the blockchain, which the core chain software does not process at all. There is server called Scot bot that processes these transactions. You can access it at the following web site: hive-engine.com, on which there is also an internal market you can use to trade all the Tribe tokens. As you use the platform you will accrue many tokens usually without necessarily even knowing about it because you'll be interacting with posts and comments under specific Tribe tags. You can go to Hive Engine to look at what you have. :)
If you have more questions, feel free to ask! :)
RE: Newbie Here!