Hey Murph,
It's new to most of us. It is called reputation points. Every member has the power to give or take points from another member. You click on the scales in the upper right hand corner of all posts. Then a pop up box will appear and you can approve or disapprove of that post and comment as to why (if you wish, no comment required).
Each click from most users is 1 point (clicks from me or Junk are worth a tad more). So it is a slow process. If you hold your mouse over the green cylinder directly under "Posts: 102" in any of your posts it will tell you what reputation rating you are at. Just about everyone is "on the distinguished road" which means you have between 10 and 50 rep points.
Once you've given a rep point to someone, you cannot give them another rep point until you've given (or taken away) points from 3 other users. This setting used to be much higher, but I've recently lowered it to 3 for now.