If you're looking for guidelines, regulations, and rules, we've got them. What to node, what not to node; what to strive for, what to avoid. Earn your bullshit, earn your factual nodes, avoid highly subjective writeups. Node for the ages, node for numbers, node your homework, node for status.

Do you hear them? They are the ones who have paid their dues, done their time, earned their bullshit, and are here to tell you what's what. Look at it: one big self-satisfied sermon whose delivery is designed to exonerate and elevate the preacher. It's a game of donning the mantle of seniority, of hiding behind the pulpit of experience. No one accuses the Grand Inquisitor of heresy. Give a sermon that sounds good, a sermon that reverberates with ideals, a sermon full of sound and fury, and few people will be willing to call it what it is: a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Let's break this cycle, evolve. We'll node for ourselves and let the votes fall where they may. We'll ignore the self-appointed authorities: bullshit is bullshit is bullshit, and it cannot be earned. We'll forget reputation, ignore the judgment, transcend the guilt, outgrow the questions of self-worth. We'll node stuff that we know is good and then leave the rest to the fates. We'll laugh at downvotes when it's clear that the people who cast them are blind to good writing. We won't be stoic about XP; we'll be totally apathetic.

Yes, I'm reckless with my downvotes. If I don't like something, it gets the shaft. I don't complain, whine, or negotiate. It's an evaluation, not a terrorist situation. If it sucks, I ding it, whether it was written by the rankest of newbies or by the most revered of E2 godheads. Maybe you know better, and all the more power to you. If you are confident in your writing, if you are your own motivation, if you are liberated, self-actuated, enlightened, my fly-by-night downvoting won't matter to you anyway. You'll shrug, smile, and carry on. And so you should.

Everything2 needs artists, not sycophants.