Milestones · 5:52pm Jan 6th, 2016
In my last blog entry, I hit a new milestone with Back to Normal becoming my first story to earn 100 downvotes.
That's not my only recent milestone...
(Although The Element of Surprise is my highest-rated fic, The Laughter I Choose to Be is still the most popular.)
Since I'm not yet (and mightn't become) a member of the 1,000 upvote club (which I naturally assume exists), the number of man pony is the best count I can boast, for now.
I mentioned EqD in the previous blog post, and how I haven't submitted any of my stories there. I could probably hit 1,000 on one of my stories without ever being featured by something like EqD, but it would take quite a bit of time. Or shenanigans. Or maybe better horsewords is all.
Speaking of shenanigans, this reminds me of something that makes me curious: where do the early downvotes that seem to pop up right after a story posts come from? Are initial reviewers more critical? I once had a pony downvote me without reading the story, who then bragged about doing it on the story thread. They didn't like the fact that my bio mentioned I was furry and that I enjoyed Homestuck (they also misconstrued that I was an "otherkin", which isn't the case), and eventually leveled transgender slurs at me. So maybe sometimes the early downvotes are just young children. 
I've had ponies threaten to downvote everything I write because they were incensed by something I wrote, but I don't really think that happens. Partly this is because I see that other good stories also seem to get many of their downvotes right out the gate. I did have a bunch of downvotes in a row once (including on my highly-rated stories, which is why I noticed), but for stories with a high vote count that sort of thing doesn't affect much. However, it does make me wonder how much of a downvote pile one should expect for a high-quality work. Kind of like GPA, I'd expect that at some point vote percentage would become less predictive of quality difference. What I mean is, I suspect that there's enough "noise" in voting that you shouldn't expect a story with 99.9% upvotes to be better than a story with 99.5% upvotes.
Or should you? Is "avoiding all downvotes" a useful predictor of quality? 
As for me, my strongest works are in the 96-97% upvote range (currently five). Then there's a stretch of 89-92% (seven of them) which I suppose are "pretty good", even though my award-winning story is ironically one of them. The Sound of One Hoof Clopping almost reaches that second tier, but it's badly written and formatted so I'm going to rewrite the whole thing this week (at which point I expect it to eventually improve).
The remaining three (and a fourth which I removed from the site) are my "bad" works, in the 71-84% range. All of them share a common theme of Twilight making questionable ethical decisions. I'm not saying they aren't badly written, but I don't think that's entirely a coincidence.
It might be simply the discussion of ethical decisions and ppl not appreciating it as an exploration of "whys" behind said ethical decisions.
They just seeing an element they disagree with and downvote because of it.
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I'm sure. Twilight is a character most of us look up to, and few ponies appreciate her having fatal flaws. I find the same is true for characterizations of Celestia.
Some of them could just be in a bad mood. I lost my temper in a group not to long ago, and I irrationally took it out on completely innocent writers in the group by down voting a bunch of stories in it. After I calmed down I relized how much of a jerk I was being, and I have since starting to read those stories to make up for it.
Or they could just be trolls.
"I've had ponies threaten to downvote everything I write because they were incensed by something I wrote," Lots of pony ass's here..Buck'um I say.
I've no idea Trick. My own stories hardly outstrip 50 readers, so I'm not the right person to ask. For me, it's an awkward pickle!
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I'm really just curious what ponies think about stories that never get any downvotes at all. Is that lucky or are they extra-special? That's all I'm blabbing on about here.
I'm willing to bet that at least one of your downvotes was because someone didn't like your wide use of the word "pony". I've occasionally seen commenters on EQD get ridiculously wound up about that. Yes, it's a stupid thing to get wound up about, but that's people for you.
Depends what you mean by "quality". A story with no downvotes is probably not outright bad, but it's probably not amazing either -- it's unlikely to be doing something really new, exciting, controversial etc. I have several with zero downvotes, and while I think they're decent I don't think they're my best. I'm prouder of several others that do have downvotes.