: Given that the OP was hardly controversial, in no way rude or offensive, and phrased as a very open question,

I agree with this. But not the rest of the line. When I read the original post, I read it as "I'm worried I'm getting more downvotes, and want to know if this is true, without getting more downvotes." In short, I see it as a request for information. But clearly, there are two ways of reading it.

Therefore possible solutions would be: 1) just give everyone more detailed information (possibly in such a way that you wouldn't have to see it if you didn't want to) such as "You have gained 2 experience points. You have 200000000 points to go to reach level vroom. (+3,-1)" or having nodes show the + and - votes as well as the total. The arguments against this have generally been that this information will cause obsession about points, but tye's willingness to answer the question suggests that perhaps the attitude has changed.

2) /msg gods Could you please tell me if I've been losing more xp lately?

With either of these solutions, the original poster gets what she or he wants (an answer without exposing her/himself to the world at large), and tye isn't guessing about whether it was an answer or a conversation that the person wanted, so everyone else is happy too.

Update Summary of my post could be that I agree with point 1 below and am not at all concerned about point 3.