@TheStarTrekGuy Yeah, well, people are gonna do what they do, and there isn't much to be done about it. Best thing is to appreciate the ones who appreciate you and your work, and ignore the rest.

@SledDriver Yeah. I wish more people focused on how fun something is to fly. While I can't run a lot of your builds, when I can they are great. Once I have played with a few replica's, they are all the same. My planes are awful tho... The most upvotes I have ever gotten are on a propeller goldfish 😀 I uploaded it as a joke

@chancey21 @Mostly @DarthAbhinav
I usualy upvote without downloading when on my phone using cellular data, but I bookmark good planes and dl them on my pc

Some people want to download it later, some upvote it because it sets a good first impression, and others download before upvoting, or sometimes don't upvote at all. When creations are first posted, they (most of the time) get more upvotes than downloads. Within 3-6 minutes, that ratio levels out, then, eventually There are many more downloads than upvotes.
Pretty simple (badum-tss)

@chancey21 Welcome to the sorry, sad world of upvoting cliques. Look at my builds. One outstanding, one-of-a-kind build after another, but hardly any of them goes over 20 upvotes. Some people are so threatened by my ranking up so quickly. Never underestimate the resentment of the mediocre.

But, you know what, those people are only sealing their fates as losers. People who are threatened by achievement and success can have nothing but a frustrating life, and I take great pleasure in that.

And yet my most recent plane has perfect flight, and is a perfect replica and has only 9 upvotes... :(@SledDriver

@chancey21 Upvoting that plane is probably an in-joke at this point, it doesn't mean anything. And everyone chooses what's important to them. To me, poor flight capabilities are a deal breaker. Others may not care about them at all.

But flight capabilities doesn’t mean everything, look at a certain plane with 600 upvotes, it has good details but it flies like a crap covered brick @SledDriver @EternalDarkness

@SledDriver I'm glad appreciation is mutual :)

It's all about expectations, one way or another. Most builds on SP are models -- they don't fly especially well, or perform their functions especially well (no offence intended, to anyone -- well-built models are great). For instance, an airplane may have aimable turrets, but it doesn't fly stably enough, or the turrets aren't controllable enough to hit anything. So it's understandable that a lot of users don't see the point in downloading something. They look at the images and part count, and hit upvote.

This really hurts the few builds that do function well, though. To get around this, if you have a functional build, make a GIF of it doing its thing and include it in the description. This will let people know that they can actually have some fun with your build.

@EternalDarkness Thanks for the vote of confidence. Your builds are the same, always high quality.

Often, I know the builder well enough to know that the build will fly very well. Example is @SledDriver. All his builds are great fliers, and they usually have custom weapon systems. So I only have to decide if I like the way it looks. I test his builds later, when I wanna have some fun with them, and they never disappoint. On the other hand, I test many builds before they are published. I have many friends who appreciate my nitpicking on WIPs, so they send builds over for final testing. When they are posted, I already know how they work, so I just hit upvote.

Even on the non-detailed aircraft, not everyone has time to download all of the builds that they like, but still respect the amount of work that went into it; so they just leave an upvote.

It's totally normal, especially on the more detailed planes, since not everyone can download them, but they can still appreciate the work that went into it.