Is the quality of my posts declining?

Question

Recently (around three months, but especially last month) I noticed that my vote/post ratio was gradually going down. Could you please give feedback, on order of decreasing importance, on those things:

• Am I being rude, offensive, a nuisance? If yes, I apologize for my inappropriate behavior.

• Do I lack communication skills?

• Is the content of my posts off-topic/low quality?

I'm concerned with this because I'd like to remain an active user and not only watch from the shadows. I believe giving good reviews and posting interesting questions is the best way to help the Code Review community, and especially the low-traffic c++ tag.

Answer 1

It's impossible to assign an absolute and correct indicator of quality to contributions, and their various facets, such as the value of the specific recommendations, and the delivery of the message. And if you cannot stick a value on it, you cannot claim correlations with other values. I think that means we can only talk about feelings here, and I'm not sure that's going to be very useful.

I think, the number of votes your posts receive depend on a great many factors, and quality is but one of them. Sometimes you will receive more, sometimes less. You can only influence the probability of how much you get, but that's not certainty. You will never have full control over this, there are just too many factors involved that cannot be controlled.

If you feel somewhat unloved this month, maybe you'll get more next month. And you'll definitely get more during Winter Bash ;-) (that's just my subjective feeling)

I'd say to just keep contributing for your own growth, increase your portfolio of solid answers, and disregard voting trends, unless you see something truly extreme, which I believe is not your case at the moment.

Answer 2

Many things influence how many votes you receive. The biggest factor is probably how many people read the question; if you choose to review code written in "minority" languages, you'll almost certainly get fewer votes than if you're reviewing C, C++ or Python.

Also, for much of the population of Stack Exchange (I think we're over-represented in Europe and North America), July and August are holiday season, so we may have lower visits and voting at that time (and if your target languages are "working" languages rather than "hobby" languages, that will have a greater effect). Do we have monthly activity stats for the site somewhere.

Finally, unless you're getting downvotes, you're not doing anything wrong, and you're continuing to help those requesting reviews. Please stay motivated, even if nobody is actually saying "Thank you" as they should!