I'd like to offer my perspective on what went on there.
At the time I removed answers, that question had two low-quality answers that don't meet our citation requirements. One was from a user saying “I've never played this game but try this, I'm sure it will work”; the other was from a more established high-rep user posting another answer also without backing it up as remotely workable. (If a thing in a game is fundamentally boring, colourful narration usually doesn't make it interesting — it makes it boring and a drag.)
That high-rep user should know better. High-rep users set an example for other users to follow (whether they want to or not) and this was setting the example: “yes, it's fine, come post your arbitrary untested zero-expertise answers.” The longer those posts sat there, the more likely we were to get other answers exactly as inappropriate and low-quality as these.
There were two outcomes here: the posts get downvoted and/or removed, correctly signalling their inappropriateness. Or, the posts get upvoted, which is not only damaging to our site's viability as a useful resource, it's damaging and misleading to people facing this issue in Eclipse Phase. This second route is bad for everybody.
I chose to fast forward down the first route and remove those posts early to reduce the chance of attracting more crap. I also posted a warning comment on the question specifically to avoid getting more crap. One of the answers didn't include explicit statements they'd never played eclipse phase — I left them an offer to revise their post and flag for undeletion, an offer they haven't taken up.
Our site needs to remain one for expert guidance.
This meta discussion is pretty healthy to have. The actions I took were examples of cleanup activities the moderators have been doing just because it's the kind of thing RPG.SE diamond moderators do — it just sort of worked out that way in the site's early years. Revising whether and how we want to keep going with that is pretty good.
I am open to moderators continuing along our current practices, or leaving things to the community to downvote and sort out. Either one can work well and I have faith in the community's ability to overall sort things out effectively and make good decisions.
However: we need to remain a community that curates expert guidance. That means, at its simplest, advice and solutions from someone who has any clue at all what they're talking about. When someone is suggesting a homebrew solution, or custom subjective solution, Good Subjective suggests they should mention their experience with how that solution actually worked out in practice. This isn't a burdensome request: it takes a sentence or two to mention it worked effectively and did so-or-so thing.
Those who play Fate or Dungeon World or other non-D&D games might emphathise with me when I say: seeing zero-expertise attempts at solutions from people who haven't even played our games sucks. Normally they come in the form of a D&D player assuming our game has zero difference from their game so whatever works there will work here. (Not always D&D players, but usually. Non-D&D players seem to generally get that other games have huge divides and expertise isn't necessarily transferrable.) Normally, those solutions are completely wrong. Such a post amounts to crap and clutter, if it isn't actively annoying that someone can conclude they can guide us on our game's function without even so much as cracking open one of its books.
We're a useful site because we specifically curate expert guidance. If we just accumulate crap and don't filter it effectively, we're not much different from Yahoo! Answers or forums. We have a quality bar and it doesn't take very much to meet it — it just takes actually having a clue, and sticking to answering where you have a clue. Curating this means the community needs to downvote, and push for substantiation, where none is provided and someone seems to be just shooting a crap guess from their chair.
The question Players skipping side quests just to have a laugh at the DM was sitting with an answer whose author said they'd never even played an RPG before at +3/-3 yesterday. That was worrying to me. It is a relief to see it at +3/-5 today. RPG expertise is kind of important here... because an RPG player would hopefully spot that the answer is predicated on “prepare material for both choices!” when in an RPG players can make up their own third or fourth choices and engage with neither prepared choice.
I wanted to ask this person to back their answer up... but they admitted they couldn't, and I didn't have the heart to call them out on it. I want to go to that question, request everyone provide any subjective substantiation at all for their solutions (when those solutions are subjective), and clean up the ones that don't — this meta's giving me pause because I want to see how the community can work out situations like this without moderator intervention. So far it seems to be working out OK.
I've been meaning for a few months to create a meta question asking what our post substantiation requirements are, or what the subjective substantiation requirements are at the very least, so that our community can collaboratively express & establish our standards together to then point people to when substantiation is needed. Currently they're just expressed in the super-generic Good Subjective, Bad Subjective post (which talks more about questions than answers) and in super-specific contexts like this one about homebrew. I'll take a look at asking that later this week.
Side thought: on the importance of downvoted posts
So a couple of things occur to me around the voting dynamic on the site.
First, content that is present and strongly downvoted is instructive to users. It sets an example and warns people not to do the same thing. It's kind of like that Pirates Ye Be Warned sign that Captain Jack Sparrow sees at the start of Pirates of the Caribbean:
“Don't do this thing.”
Moderators erring on removing inappropriate content removes the examples of badness users should be avoiding. (Users are free to take down their own low-quality content, but moderators don't necessarily need to do it for them. This is something nvoigt is getting at in their own post.)
This requires judicious downvoting though. If moderators are removing a lot of stuff, it could mean the examples of “don't do this” go away and users don't get trained on what they shouldn't do as much. It might also lead voting users to give things too much of the benefit of the doubt, since anything left behind can't be too bad right, the terrible stuff is already deleted right?
I'd definitely encourage users to downvote to set examples of the content they do not want on the site (such as unsubstantiated or crap posts that don't appear to convey any game expertise at all) and we'll see how we can work with that.
