Downvoter

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Punisher, as shown by voting spread and history, is a major downvoter.
A downvoter is someone who uses a YTMND account mostly to downgrade the rankings of many sites by giving them the lowest possible score. This is known at YTMND as downvoting. Rating any YTMND
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is also called a downvote. Once a site has been downvoted, its overall average rating suffers, making it difficult to restore and less likely to draw attention to potential viewers. What sets a downvoter apart from a normal user is a tendency to give a site a rating of
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- In some cases, this rating is given despite the site's quality. A well-timed downvote can be fatal to a new site, no matter what the quality- by the time some more people vote on the site, it will probably be off the main page.

Some downvoters often perform their actions by going to the profile of a targeted user and downvoting all their sites. This was accomplished without viewing the sites themselves. These are known as revenge or blind downvotes. Max has taken measures to prevent or discourage revenge downvoting by deleting duplicate accounts created for such purposes. One such occasion resulted in the deletion of 2,211 duplicate accounts, reversing over 250,000 votes. A feature was later implemented that required users to load a YTMND in their web browser before being allowed to vote on it.

Downvoter Stereotypes

These are intended only to explain certain behavioral patterns regarding any given user's downvotes.

  • Attention Whores - Accounts created solely for the purpose of drawing attention to themselves. These may exist for any number of reasons, but in the world of the downvoter, an attention whore will generally one-star a site and leave an extremely abrasive or obnoxious comment (e.g. "you fail, please try again ^_^"), resulting in a very wide (and very bad) reputation.
  • Citer - Downvotes a person's site because they don't cite their sources.
  • Critics - These users generally tend to express a higher level of rationality and discretion than other downvoters. If they give a site a rating of
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    , they either offer constructive criticism (express or implied) that directs an author on how they must improve his or her YTMND, or they simply take time to seriously explain why they did not like that YTMND.
  • Fad Haters - Any users that will downvote any site that is centered around or makes references to a specific fad. For example, a site featuring Bill Cosby's voice remixed into music will result in downvotes from users that despise the Cosby fad.
  • Glory Hogs - A user that has a site that makes it to the Up and Coming section that will downvote the other sites in up and comming to keep theirs in that section.
  • Grammar Nazis - These users will downvote on the slightest indication of a spelling or grammatical error. Generally, this applies to text-heavy YTMNDs.
  • Revenge Downvoters - Generally, the revenge downvoter delivers a rating of one star to all of a particular user's sites. This is often due to receiving a ranking from the victim of the revenge downvoter that the downvoter considers unfair or unsatisfactory or as countermeasures against said kinds of votes on popular sites or sites made by popular users.
  • Shock Haters - These users will downvote shock sites and sites featuring animal cruelty. One incidence of this resulted in the birth of the NEDM fad.
  • Stolen Content Haters: These users either seek and downvote stolen content, or downvote it when they come upon it. This group also seems to be evolving a subculture of pseudo-stolen content haters, who usually fall under one of the other stereotypes, but does not actually attack stolen content, but instead preys upon the general hatred towards stolen content from YTMNDers in order to generate misinformed downvotes, and sometimes, quite successfully.


See Also

  • Upvoter - the opposite of a downvoter.