Why was my answer deleted last night?

Question

Why was my answer to this question deleted?

How do I effectively get people to look past my age when considering my abilities, if they know how old I am?

My answer is below, for reference. I thought it was a good one - and certainly not delete-worthy:

I think that the question as written is overly broad; here, context is crucial, and the subject matter of the online community that you moderate is relevant information that you'd need to provide, in order to get a good answer.

However, let's assume that this IPS site is the online community that you moderate; but this means that we can apply the guidelines from the diamond moderator Catija:

[1] For your consideration: "On Topic" help page contents

and you may immediately refer the user to those guidelines; in other words, if that user is disputing your abilities to moderate IPS, have him or her contact the Stack Exchange staff members. There is no need for you to say anything more.

Now in general, e.g. not an IPS community, not necessarily a Stack Exchange site, I would say that the subject matter is crucial. For instance, it is natural and entirely justifiable for someone looking to ask a question about parenting, on some parenting Q&A forum, to expect that the moderators are not teenagers -- unless a teenage moderator has had relevant experience in parenting.

So, I think it's important not to conflate maturity with subject matter expertise.

If you have subject matter expertise (say, in parenting), then again, refer the user to that online community's staff members. You could briefly tell the user that you are qualified to moderate and give your reasons, but that's not really necessary.

If for some reason you are moderating an online community that doesn't have staff members that can help, then I'd recommend showing that you are qualified to moderate through your actions, e.g. with high quality answer posts, helpful comments, good conflict management, etc., rather than verbalizing it.

Answer 1

Your answer fails the most important test:

Answers must answer the question

What's the question:

Title: How do I effectively get people to look past my age when considering my abilities, if they know how old I am?
How do I get them to trust my abilities despite my age?

Your answer is:

I'd recommend showing that you are qualified to moderate through your actions, e.g. with high quality answer posts, helpful comments, good conflict management, etc., rather than verbalizing it.

But the OP already says that's part of what they're doing:

So, while I hope that my actions will speak for themselves, I'm also looking for a way to communicate my response to this.

This wasn't posted in the question until recently but a (now) deleted comment said it an hour before your answer was posted. We generally hope that people will include additional info in the question but it's really valuable for you to read comments before answering:

To use absolute time, that's 2018-01-23 10:20:56Z. Your answer was posted at 2018-01-23 11:21:43Z - an hour later.

So, your answer isn't what the question is looking for - a way to directly communicate to someone about moderation.

Your answer is 90% "this is why people don't trust you - because at your age, you can't be an expert in this topic", 5% "your question isn't clear", and 5% "Answer that you already know".

To address that first 5%, what sphennings wrote in a comment is absolutely true.

I can't speak to why it was deleted, but if you think a question is too broad then you shouldn't be posting an answer. You should be working to edit the question to reduce it's scope, or working to get it closed by flagging or voting. – sphennings 1 hour ago

The first paragraph of your answer clearly indicates that you think the question isn't ready to be answered... so don't answer it.

How to fix your answer:

If you want to actually address the OP's question, consider the sites they actually moderate rather than sites they obviously don't. Arwen is neither an IPS mod nor a Parenting mod. They're a moderator on Literature, which is entirely different. In chat you seemed to be a bit concerned about life experience... but "experience" on Literature is reading books... something that I know Arwen does quite a bit. Heck, even their username is book-related.

Consider the actual question - focus your answer on how Arwen can communicate with the user directly - without appealing to staff or ignoring the question or hoping that their contributions to the site are enough - if they were enough, the user wouldn't have asked the question in the first place!

If you edit your answer to address these concerns, I'm sure that it can be undeleted but, until then, it will stay deleted.