Am I getting serial downvotes, or are my answers suddenly this bad?

Question

I answered from personal experience on this question.

Got two downvotes in ten minutes.

I've been seeing this a lot recently -- seemingly anything with a 5e tag, but that's nearly all the questions I've seen over the past few months that I think I can answer. I can understand it when it's rules related, but the question linked above really should have "system-agnostic" instead of 5e; there's nothing in it related to any kind of game rules (other than a system played with a grid of some kind).

As you can see from my rep, I've had good answers in the past. Have I just forgotten how to answer, have the standards changed (other than the strong increase in "be nice" which I don't believe I've violated), have I got multiple serial downvoters, or is something else happening?

Answer 1

The site has become stricter about unsupported answers, and your answers are largely unsupported.

Please note all this is not to criticize you, but to explain what's going on so you can adapt to it.

Reviewing your recent deleted and undeleted answers, the vast majority are simply stated as "Do this/this is the answer-fact." Use name cards. Leave your GM. Eliminate Wish from access by mortals. Sell six bullets for a copper. Use a session 0. Your AC is 18.

But in very few of these cases (deleted or undeleted, upvoted or downvoted) are the answers backed up per What are the citation expectations of answers on RPG Stack Exchange?.

In fact, even worse, in some cases it's clear you definitely don't have that experience, like the session 0 recommendation when someone asked you "have you done this" you replied "no, and I can't even put myself in the shoes of an inexperienced GM since it's been 20 years since I was one." Then what grounds do you have to recommend it? Hearsay?

This is all a warning sign of Bad Subjective answers - ones you thought up but are not grounded in either the rules (flatfooted in 5e, nonexistent rogue feats in 5e) or in experience. We don't like answers that "sound good" but may not actually be a good idea; that runs the risk of actually hurting the person asking questions.

The fix here is to only answer questions you have experience with (game system wise or situation wise), and explain how it's worked for you. This doesn't have to be "pages and pages" but should have another couple sentences.

Here's an example, your most highly upvoted recent answer, How can I get people to remember my character's gender?. It probably should have downvotes, and it probably doesn't because enough people have seen this/it's worked for them that they are just mentally editing in the experience rather than looking for it in the answer. I mean, it's a good technique, it's one I have used and agree with - but the answer itself doesn't help someone know whether this is just a crazy idea that's in reality a terrible practice that hasn't worked for people.

If you haven't used name cards, then this answer should be deleted. No one should be "making up" answers on this site, we don't do brainstorming/idea generation here, that's what forums are for.

If you have, it doesn't take much to add a couple sentences of times you've done this or seen it done and how it helped. "I went to a convention recently and everyone made index card name tents with name, profession, and a gender symbol and it helped everyone keep it straight even coming into a new set of PCs cold." <- would be my personal example, in this case at Chupacabracon playing Call of Cthulhu.

I get how it's a little confusing, because some of your unsupported answers are getting upvotes and so there's not a clear correlation between your upvoted/remaining versus downvoted/deleted answers in terms of backing up. But all answers need some kind of backup besides "I said so."

Answer 2

The GS/BS norms have changed of late

Your answers are not "suddenly, this bad." You have been a quality contributor for a good long while.

I've been watching this thing that you mention for the past six months. My general trigger is comments, as well as discussions on meta, though I occasionally see discussions on this in chat. No, I am not going to link to about 500+ comments to support this answer. (And to make that demand nearly impossible, most of them are now opaque to me due to being gone and me not being a diamond mod).

Without getting into an academic discussion of formal norms and informal norms, this site operates with a variety of informal norms. What you are seeing is that an informal norm about what constitutes 'back it up' has moved its center of mass based on the user group on this site that cares enough to speak up ... speaking up. Informal norms in a group will often change when the membership of a group changes.

• The trend I am seeing is a demand on the answer writer to be more detailed in their citation of relevant at table experience. In other words, the point you make in this comment

  So, bottom line, if I can't spend an hour on a long, hyper-detailed answer, I'm better not answering at all. Point taken.

  is answered: yes. That seems to be becoming the new norm. (But it's not a policy).

  We've had another meta recently about GS/BS where we raised the question, collectively on meta, on whether GS/BS still fits the site. There also seems to have arisen a disagreement on what constitutes support of the subjective kind. Related metas are here, and here, and also here:

The squeaky wheel gets the most attention. Human behavior, 101. Whether this is a good change, a bad one, or somewhere in between is beyond this format's tools to judge. It is what it is.

Related note

A while back we ran into a collective disagreement, or lack of clarity, on what "primarily opinion based close reasons are" for those using the review queue to vote to close or reopen a question where POB was the major selection in the question triage process. As one might expect, the opinions on what constitutes "opinion based" varied.

Answer 3

Recency Bias?

Looking at your most recent answers, you have very few downvotes with the exception of this answer.

I'm not sure if you're looking at different data, but the most recent answers doesn't seem to support your concern.

Having said that, a lot of your answers do seem to be without a lot of support for either objective or subjective answers. That may contribute to the downvotes and would be an immediate improvement to your answers if you can start backing them up.

After reviewing your recently deleted answers from this comment, my paragraph above still stands highlighting the problem of lack of support.

Improve, don't remove

Having reviewed your deleted answers and your recent still alive answers, I think the core problem is that you don't back them up with support.

You may want to consider adding the support detail to answers rather than just deleting them. You may not get the rep back, but remember you get more rep for upvotes than you lose with downvotes. And this can also help you improve your answer writing for when you first submit answers.