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I answered a fair number of questions this morning, and built up a fair bit of rep.

Then I went away to do something else.

Then I came back to look in, and it seems that a significant number of my answers had been voted down, without any indication as to why. The most plausible reason I can think of is that it is considered bad form to take all the latest questions, one after the other, and provide answers for each one, and this bad form has fostered resentment, or something, and it has been decided that I need to be taught a lesson, or something.

So, is there an "unspoken" code of conduct that requires that a contributor does not answer more than a certain number of questions a day, or something?

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    It's probable the down-votes aren't for the number of answers, but their quality.
    – avpaderno
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 22:14
  • I'm always willing to learn what it is about those answers that made them of low enough quality so as for them to be voted down. If a question has been answered correctly, what reason could there be for downvoting it?
    – Prime Mover
    Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 4:57
  • @EddieKal Interestingly, while I've had a "Serial voting is reversed" action happen, the downvoting is still happening, but this now seems to be on my other answers instead. But it's good to know that the system is working in my defence. I admit it's a pointless thing to lose sleep over -- but if there is something systematically wrong about the way I am approaching this site, I am eager to learn what that is. On the other hand, if it's merely bad manners of a co-user, then that's a problem that's far easier to correct.
    – Prime Mover
    Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 5:24
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    Welcome to ELL, I think your contributions are a real asset to the site. We need more native speakers like you around here.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jun 9, 2020 at 13:10

1 Answer 1

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So, is there an "unspoken" code of conduct that requires that a contributor does not answer more than a certain number of questions a day, or something?

As Eddie Kal mentioned, there isn't any rule like that here in ELL. At the moment, two of your answers have a -1 each and all other answers have an overall score of 0 or more. The downvotes can be due to a number of reasons. Here are some:

  1. Someone didn't like that fact that you wrote 19 answers in 7 hours (basically what you said). There could be more than one person who is upset at this.
  2. Someone is just having a bad day and decided to downvote questions and answers they did not like.
  3. Your downvoted answers may be incorrect, they may be lacking important distinctions, or they may not be of high quality. In this case, you can always post that question here in meta and ask the community for feedback.
  4. You may have answered several questions that are actually off-topic or not deemed high quality by the community. Answering questions that are off-topic encourages more low quality questions in the future, which is something the community does not want. And some may have downvoted your answers for this reason1. They may feel that if you had taken the time to read through the help center rules and some of the meta questions on "quality", you would not have answered these off-topic questions.

I have not read your answers and so I can't comment on them. But if it is serial downvoting, then it will be corrected by the system, which you have already seen.

1 Whether this is a reasonable, fair, or valid reason for a downvote is a discussion for a different meta question; I am only stating possible reasons.

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  • Many thanks for your feedback. So should I go through and delete some of my answers then, if I have posted too many of them? I wondered at the time if I was doing too many, but I was having too much fun to stop.
    – Prime Mover
    Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 6:11
  • @PrimeMover Deleting your answers is not a good idea. Regardless of the neg. score, the answers may still be useful to the community. A -1 does not say much; I would be worried if it was a -3 though, which it is not in your case. If the community feels your answers are great, they will upvote them, particularly to reverse the -1. And you may also get upvotes later on when most people come across these questions/answers (or when they come online). It has been only 24 hours since you wrote them.
    – AIQ
    Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 6:20
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    Okay no worries, I've come here from mathematics stack exchange where things more considerably more quickly than this, and in which 24 hours is a very long time. :-) I'll put this to bed now.
    – Prime Mover
    Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 6:30

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