Posted a skip that failed, lashed out at some users in the thread and was being uncooperative. This is what I staffposted on:
Tell me about it. Most of the new ones are put together either by throwing mud at the wall and hoping it sticks or things so boring they belong on the Log of Anomalous Items and to avoid that they tack on some plot to do with death in some way which you can tell has just been tacked on.
Still if it sticks out from the crap, what makes it get downvoted? I'm still curious of what I did wrong.
My response (can't figure out how to do quote-in-quote yet):
Don't be rude and criticize stuff out of a reaction to your article being downvoted.
This is blatantly not true, and there's a lot of work that goes into them, as well as people getting feedback on the forums and on IRC. This is 90% sure to make the article much much better into a working state or a state that can stay on the mainlist.
It's barely understandable what your thing does. It takes almost three paragraphs to realize what is anomalous about this and what's going on. You pile on effect after effect for no real reason, and it feels like massively cheap body horror. There's not much to make the reader interested or care. Body horror only gets you so far; you need substance, a reason to make your reader get sucked into the story and make them want to know what's going on, why it's going on, why they should feel squicked… this does none of that. And it drags on, giving us details that the reader doesn't need to know and serves more purpose. All this would be pointed out if you're patient enough to shop your drafts around.
Don't be an asshole and say the new stuff is shit because yours didn't succeed. It's also a violation of the Criticism Policy.