Votes spent so far (in accordance to the prophecy): 3065
Upvotes: approx. 3060
Downvotes: 0
Poll votes: more than 2 (To read and experience others' writing ; The pointless downvotes so often received by factuals, other polls I can't remember now)
Nothing will be downvoted. Ever. If I wanted to discourage free content, I wouldn't fucking be here. Discouragement is a powerful thing, especially when that's the first impression some (most?) new noders get of the place. Waving a hand dismissively from the top of the fellow noders list and saying earn your bullshit or Your first writeup will be nuked: Don't give up will not change this impression. Being asked repeatedly long after you've read the FAQ in it's entirety "Have you read the FAQ yet?" will not improve this impression. It will only compound the suspicion the new noder often gets that they are not welcome here and that the people with voting/cooling/nuking priviledges assume they are retarded and worthless. The newbie you downvoted yesterday might have been the newbie who would have wrote a fucking awesome node today had he or she not been turned off the place by the negativity. The truly awful will be deleted by the editors with or without extra insult.
If someone went to the trouble of researching, writing, and linking something, in the hopes of amusing or educating me, without any motherfucking pay, I'm not going to discourage that. Yes, amuse and educate me for free. Thank you. If the write-up sucks, I know full well there will be plenty of others here who will jump all over their shit, so I'll just move along and let the wolves pile on until the editors get a chance to delete it. I'm not one to snarl at free content, even when it sucks. Withholding an upvote is punishment enough; they'll see the effort they spent was ignored.
Most people seem to love to declare what they hate, but avoid disclosing a like for fear it will be insulted. Well, I love free shit. I hate to see a well-meaning person be unappreciated or dismissed to the point of silence. Fuck that. Everyone knows something I want them to tell me someday. Could you do me a favor and assume the next person you're thinking about downvoting might just be that person?
And if you decide to downvote something, could you at least have the decency to msg the author with an explanation? Downvotes are not constructive feedback, and anonymity does not equal lack of accountability.
Also, the four assholes who went through every subnode in my Vedic Mathematics project and downvoted each one should be stabbed in the eyes. If you don't like me, fine. But don't fucking downvote useful content because you're a jackass with a lot of votes. You are the reason I am not bothering to node the rest of the sutras. Sutras which, by the way, are currently not explained anywhere on the internet. Go ahead. Look for them. One or two have an inscrutable explaination somewhere, but the rest aren't out on the web. But screw it. It just ain't worth it. So few upvotes, all those downvotes, and my merit tanked putting me as far from level 3 as I was before I started. And don't message me about "woe unto those that do," all right. I want be able to upvote more in a day, which means getting to level 3. And I'd like greater accountability placed on systematic downvoters. Just because they're common doesn't mean it should be excused. You can like a community while refusing to reflexively excuse and defend it's flaws. Downvotes are, in my opinion, the largest and most easily abused flaw in E2. Anything as negative and easy to abuse as a downvote attracts abusive people to E2. Another community I go to (and contribute the huge majority of my work to) operates just fucking fine with upvotes and nuke requests only. Anything negative has to be told directly to the person, without the sociopath's paradise of anonymity.
By the way, the four douchenozzles who systematically downvoted the Vedic Math project are at least a level 3, because a level 2 wouldn't have had enough votes to go through and downvote nearly 20 things within 5 minutes (wow, fast reader or grand coincidence?). I would think someone who is invested enough to reach level 3 would also give enough of a damn about E2 to not pull this crap, but I am once again proved wrong. One of these people is nasreddin, and I will not hesitate to post the names of any other known systematic downvoters. If you abuse E2, everyone should know.
Promises I'm making here and now:
- I will not downvote anything.
- If I ever get C! priviledges, I will not just C! people who have C! me or could C! me. It just looks so pathetic when I go into the Cool Archive and see the same two names several times in a row, Chinging each other back and forth in a display of self-serving praise. Am I to believe that those are truly the wu's that are most deserving of a cooling? I will C! level 1 noders if they deserve it. I will C! XP stoics who will never raise to level 4 if they deserve it. I will C! daylog entries if they deserve it. Hell, I'll even C! highly subjective write ups that are posted as their own node (Oh the horror!) if they deserve it. This is assuming I ever get to level 4, which is a stretch.
- I will brush and floss more. That's a promise.
- I will remember the nodes that hooked me on E2 in the first place, and grieve their being nuked when management decided to "raise the bar". I will miss you, The Single Sickest Joke Ever. And you as well, Your entire family has perished in a burrito factory explosion. How do you feel?. And I'm not forgetting you, Things my Grandmother Said. And who can forget Bert and Ernie are not gay. They're puppets. They don't even have legs.? And I will even miss BFMcF when it is eventually removed in an act of historical revision. I'll miss others I can't remember the names of that were deemed "too subjective." You know what? Humor is always subjective, but, if you eliminate humor to raise the bar, you end up becoming Wikipedia. And then you suck.
- I will try to keep my subjectivity in daylogs, as I have been repeatedly instructed to do, but I'll let you in on a little secret: every list I make includes something I know I'm going to break. Yeah. That's because I'm hardcore.