how do i improve karma so I can upvote helpful questions/answers?
this should be in the help/faq
I have nothing to contribute at the moment but I have been helped by a question and an answer and it seems polite and useful to upvote accordingly
To give an example I upvoted this eligible question. This will increase your “karma” by 10.
It should be sufficient now to allow you upvoting.
thanks very much! I will now upvote the question that originally helped me 
for improve of your karma you should just give right answer and help to people
right, but in this case i am just learning, and I don’t have answers for people. I guess I could spend enough time to look for questions and try to answer them, but right now I just wanted to reward good questions and answers. I imagine there are a lot of people that land here and get good info without wanting to or being able to answer questions. On Stack Exchange I am already known, so if I am on a new site related to Stack Exchange I can usually do some minimal stuff like upvoting.