The More-Or-Less-Complete Downvoter's Guide To Justifying Negatives. (Contributions welcome) · 12:30pm May 21st, 2016
* It's in the New column
* It's currently popular
* It just updated
* It's in the Feature box
** Create second account and downvote it twice
* You didn't write it
* You're downvoting everything on the site today and why should this story be any different?
* You don't like the author's avatar picture
* You don't like the title
* Or the chapter title
* Cover art
* Lack of cover art
* You would have written a much better story using the same base idea, which you instinctively know without reading the story or grasping what the base idea is, because you're just that good
* Death Of The Author? Murder Of The Author!
* Your favorite character isn't displayed among the tags
* Your favorite character is displayed among the tags and how dare anyone else work with them!
* Because you can
* Would it matter if she was?
* If you weren't hooked by the end of the first sentence, it was never going to happen
** And by that, you mean the first sentence of the description
*** The short description
* It doesn't have any downvotes yet and you're not going to let it get away with that
* DOWNVOTE PARTY!
* Someone downvoted you once and now you must downvote everyone everywhere until you find your revenge
* The next downvote will create a personally-amusing total
* Pony stories are fundamentally stupid and you signed onto the site just so you could downvote the entire thing until the fandom itself realized you were right and disbanded
** Yes, this seems to be taking a little more time than you originally planned
* Dat writer
* It's a standalone
* It's in a 'verse
* Why is there a Sex tag?
* Why isn't there a Sex tag?
* Human tag
* Human In Equestria
* Equestria Girls
* Equestria Girls In Equestria
* Displaced
* DIsplacement issues
* It's not your fetish
* Why isn't anyone working with your fetish?
* Author has more followers than you and doesn't deserve that
* Author has less followers than you, which makes you even more qualified to look down on their creations
* Self-insert and it wasn't your self
* Does this look like the religious text on which your entire faith is based to you?
* Red-green color blindness combined with left-right directional challengement
* Use of word 'challengement'
* Peaches
* After careful reading of the entire story, you find that the author's style, plot, characterizations, and other such elements are not up to your standards for enjoyment, and so you must regretfully place a red thumb simply because in your now fully-formed opinion, you personally found the composition to be subpar.
...nah. That's too much like work.
Oh snap, who downvoted your stuff D:
You missed;
*Contains the Waifu Thief (actually I'm totally okay with that one
)
*Contains Spike shipping.
*Does not contain Spike shipping.
*How dare you break up this totally canon ship for your crackship?! Death is clearly to good for you, DEATH I say! (Speaking from personal experience on that one...)
3960728
I've just noticed that recently, a few things seem to be getting downvoted due to a mix of two primary reasons:
A. Existing
B. Someone just noticed A
This isn't exactly limited to my work.
ETA: Hey, look! Someone noticed this post exists!
Somewhat relevant: When poking around the mega-index-of-all-story-metadata, and attempting statistics on it, I've initially thought to investigate the properties of derived rankings.
Naively, I thought that (upvotes - downvotes) / views is a good derived metric for a single 'story quality'.
It's not. The distribution of upvotes / views is an honest bell curve. The distribution of downvotes / views is a very different curve, and I don't think it's a gaussian. There are a few stories for which upvotes + downvotes > views, by a lot, and I caught them because for them, the derived metric was higher than 1 -- i.e. they had spurious upvotes.
It's almost like the people who upvote and the people who downvote are entirely different sets of people. :)
Couple more:
It's a troll fic
It's a Rainbow Factory/Cupcakes fic with My Little Nyx (or just one of those)
It doesn't deserve the ratio it currently enjoys.
3960744
Thus leading to what might be the ultimate trolling title: My Little Nyx With Cupcakes At The Rainbow Factory.
...what? It's a school bake sale.
*considers*
{Evil}Y'know, I could probably have a thousand words together in a couple of hours...{/evil}
(No Patreon charge if I do. I'm not that evil.)
There was one fic which I only downvoted after reading the writer's own comments, in which he proved to be an insufferable tool. Don't get me wrong, the fic itself wasn't that great either, but it usually takes more than that for me to downvote. The more I read about said writer on sites besides Fimfiction, the more I realized that downvote was a very good call. I also realized that 'insufferable tool' was an understatement.
Apropos of nothing, said writer eventually left Fimfiction after getting into a tiff with the mods and deleted all of his work on this site. No great loss.
• Author has exactly as many followers as you, and downvotes must suffice since you cannot decaptiate someone and claim their power over the Internet. Not yet, anyway.
I think you covered about ninety-five percent of all cases, but here are a few more from my experience:
• Story was too hard on a controversial character
• Story wasn't hard enough on a controversial character
• Disagreeing with political discussion in the comments that the author is avoiding
• Disagreeing with author's stance towards responsibility in a stable time loop.
• Didn't like the episode on which the story was based
• Story dared, dared, to give ponies last names
• First-person antagonist character doesn't present himself as a big enough sleazeball
• Crossover
3960761
Oh, you've read that too?
It's pretty easy to guess who you mean just based on relatively recent and fairly noticeable departures. I never heard about any part of said tiff, but I'm usually well outside the site's gossip circuit.
3960769
Having MidnightRambler as a follower is sort of a double-edged sword.
* I didn't want to be the first person to downvote this, but now that someone else has done it I'm going to join in.
(My story about Clover the Clever had zero downvotes for the first year minus one day. Then it got three at once.)
3960773
No, but I've heard of the series, and liked the basic premise.
"It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."
You're not missing out on anything worthwhile. Suffice to say, it's even stupider than you could imagine.
3960784
{Downvote}I don't know. Based on my stories, I'd say I can imagine some pretty @#$% stupid stuff.{/downvote}
* I haven't downvoted a story in the last five minutes and I need my fix.
* I absolutely hate stories with that tag!
** Oh wait, that was just a tag of a similar color. Well, I can't be expected to read every last, or first, word of a story.
*** And speaking of, the colors of the tags on this story just clashes horribly, darling.
* I saw the title and expected something different, whether it was a justified expectation or not.
* I misread the title and expected something different.
* This story is in a group that I think it doesn't belong in.
* Those little hands tell me to click them. All of them.
3960729
Addendum: Anyone who is portrayed in a relationship of any kind with my waifu, is hinted at to have a relationship of any kind with them, looks at them wrong, talks to them, or exists in an estimated vicinity of twenty miles of them is obviously a waifu-stealer.
3960816
Y'do realize this is leading into Ponies Downvote FIMFic.
*It's second person
*It uses the name Anon
Too many typos.
No typos. The author must be obsessive compulsive.
I think I have downvoted MAYBE 5 stories. Ever. And it was usually for reasons such as "Holy shit the grammar and spelling is so bad I can't even read this" or "You can't just dream sequence the ENTIRE PLOT ARC because your readers were being slightly critical..."
3960827
* The colors of the tags clash horribly, darling.
* No apples in this story, 0/10 points.
* No, I didn't read it through, but how would you write a great story without the most awesome pony in Equestria?!
*Ooopsie,IkeepclickingthewrongbuttonseversinceItriedoneofthosetinylittlehotchocolatestheysellhere.Itwasn'tevenagoodhotchocolate,waytoobitter,heywheredidthespacekeygo?
* I just thought, uhm... I mean... Nevermind. I'm sorry.
* I count seven typos, five cases of wrong punctuation and one case of tense confusion just in the first chapter. How could you?! Don't you have any respect for the Equestrian language?!
Okay, how the hell do I downvote this guide? It's missing some very important points.
*Author failed to build a wonder before hitting the Imperial Age.
*Contains Luna X Guard shipping.
*Doesn't contain Luna X Guard shipping
*Story bashes Princess Celestia
*Story Dosen't bash Princess Celestia.
*Wololo!
Why is there no 'upvote' for blog posts? I really want an 'upvote' right now.
*Story doesn't comply 100% to the downvoters headcanon. How dare you.
*Coverart is too good. New readers must be lured in by story content only.
*Coverart is too bad. We require some minimum quality standard.
*There is a critical comment on page 73. Surely this story is garbage.
3960922
And then there's the one I do get every so often, which is:
* Story contains Celestia, but not in the way I see her, you character-misinterpreting hack
Totally down voting this post. Estee is wasting valuable letters that could be used in updating a story.
Seems to me like you're of the opinion that no downvotes should be allowed.
3961076
No. I don't have a problem with downvotes which come because someone truly doesn't like my work on a given piece, and I generally (and openly) appreciate when someone takes the time to explain why they redthumbed. What gets annoying is "Hey, there's a story with no negatives. Let me fix that..." and many of the other kneejerk reactions. If I get a downvote, I want thought to have been involved, and not the one which says I'm gonna troll this writer and see if I can ruin their whole day.
Short form: it's generally the difference between trying to make a point and trying to score one.
3961091
Well there's your problem!
3960753 Not if i beat you to it.
3961210
Get your own 5,000,000 downvote idea!
3960769
Wait, that's not how that works? I wondered why I didn't feel different. I have some apology letters I need to write now.
3961230 Already did.
3961243
By my math, you're 499,626 downvotes short.
3961249 Maybe, but how short am I from having the most downvoted story in the fandom?
3961256
Depends on what the current most downvoted story is, and the ratings sort search doesn't automatically provide the largest number.
The work with the most redthumbs might be this one. But when you look at the other side of the tally...
(Oddly, if you choose to look at that as a page views to upvotes ratio, it's 42:1 -- which isn't exactly strong. On the other hand, that's nearly half a million page views, which I'm guessing most of us wouldn't be complaining about.)
3960922
You forgot
* Conversion Bureau
* Anti-Conversion Bureau
* Authored by an infamous Conversion Bureau egomaniac.
Some stories deserve downvotes.
3961322
I'd be curious to see what would happen if we got a "Meh..." button.
3961327 I would use that button! There are stories where I just give up and stop reading after the first couple of thousand words, with no improvement in sight, but which aren't bad enough to justify a downvote. I would like the opportunity to warn the next potential reader of the "meh"-ness of it all.
3961327 We would finally get a button that means something?
3961327
It would be more useful feedback, at least. I'd be even happier if we got a meh button and a requirement that down/up votes record a note as to why.
There's a problem with giving a reason WHY something is downvoted: you'd be obliged to read it and lose what residual faith you had left in humanity.
3960853 Admittedly, it's a rarity to find second-person stories that actually don't suck. Doesn't mean there aren't some absolute gems, though.
*I made a comment to the author once, and they didn't immediately agree with every half formed and inarticulate
opinionFACT and so I must down vote until they change their minds.*Story/chapter contains more than 3,000 words.
*Story/chapter Contains less than 3,000 words.
* There are readers who almost never use the downvote button, and I must balance them out.
I tend to down‐vote a lot.
I also tend to up‐vote a lot.
I try to give people whose first language isn’t English more leeway than I would otherwise.
I am brutal on displaced… I hold them to the same standards that I hold everything else; namely that spelling and grammar has to at least be comparable to that of high schooler and the plot can’t have one or both parties acting like they’ve been raised on steady diet of lead paint chips. Unsurprisingly, most displaced I’ve read has earnt my down‐vote.
I abstain from down‐voting stories which are clearly not aimed at me. (Fetish‐y shit and stuff that just plain doesn’t interest me, mostly.) Depending on just what it is I might read them anyway (usually out of morbid curiosity, boredom, or both), but I won’t down‐vote them if they match my expectations. If they somehow manage to prove compelling despite their subject? You’ve got my up‐vote; you damn well earnt it. (Most recent one that comes to mind is the first — and so far, only — M/M romance novel I’ve ever managed to read. Romance novels usually aren’t my thing and M/M is not my bag, baby™, so the author is obviously doing something extremely fucking right.)
I have, to my recollection, never down‐voted one of your stories, Estee. The worst reaction you’ve ever managed to elicit from me was a solid “meh”, and that happened so long ago I can’t even remember what caused it.
3961562
A button about total and utter indifference meaning something more than the up‐ or down‐vote buttons? Irony~
3962407
I wish more people used it. If enough did you could be relatively certain that the statistical anomalies that crop up because so few people do would be diluted and authors might stop getting so butthurt over the inevitable 1–5 down‐votes that appear because of the minor hatedom that anyone with anything of value to say will garner.
The red ones update faster. /Ork
I'm still wondering how a large number of stories got so many UP votes, but personally, I seldom vote either way.
3962081
* Story/Chapter has EXACTLY 3,000 words
…which requires some circumnavigation to access, anyway.is above the work when looking at individual chapters.Allow me to add, most from experience:
*Story does not have a happy ending.
**Story has an ending that's not happy enough.
*Story has a happy ending.
*Author has a reputation for happy or sad endings and this one isn't true to form.
*Story has an ending.
*You used science!
*You didn't use science!
*You can't make up your own science!
*You must make up your own science!
*Your science fiction does not work like my science fiction!
*Has magic rules.
*Doesn't have magic rules.
*Magic rules don't comply with my magic rules.
*Magic rules comply too closely to my magic rules, you damn dirty plagiarist.
*Someone else did it first.
**Didn't do it better than they did.
**Did it better than they did.
***The quality of their doing it first is beside the point.
****Why can't you be more original?