Recently I've been seeing more and more answers starting with "from my experience" or which contain "I've been in a similar situation before/I've been in your shoes" and then don't say more about said experience.
From this meta post, we can find an explanation as to why it's not enough to say one faced similar issues in the past:
In my experience you should do X...
[...] I don't think this should be sufficient for backing up an answer. It's slightly better than nothing, at least it hints at the idea that the answerer may have done the thing before, but actually explaining and providing an example of what they did and how it worked would be better.
"In my experience" is pretty much another claim that needs some support.
I know it may be hard to answer questions on IPS as we require personal experience and/or literature citations to back answers up. It may be difficult to talk about said similar situation: maybe you think you'd be "stating the obvious" or you don't want to go into the details of your personal life online. But as said in the above mentioned post,
[...] When you provide a subjective solution you believe will resolve the situation, we expect that you cite analogous experience of how it has worked out in actual practice — your own experience or someone else's.
Keep in mind any cultural differences when doing so.
Describing how it worked out is more preferable to describing how well it worked out: “these things happened, the people I was interacting with felt this way about it” is preferable to “it worked well”, but either is preferable to no citation of it actually being tried at all.
The experience does not have to be of the exact same situation, although that would be ideal. Experience of similar or analogous situations is also relevant and helpful, at least to the extent they are similar/analogous enough to be relevant.
(Emphases mine)
There's a lot of information in both the posts I linked but I think the most important things to remember when answering are this:
"in my experience" / "I've been in your shoes" does not count as backup. It doesn't say much about what is said experience and we don't have any proof it is the same/similar enough to what the OP is facing right now.
said backup does not need to have happened to you: maybe you witnessed someone trying what you're suggesting and you've seen how it worked. That's okay too.
please remember that there's no such thing as "stating the obvious" when it comes to interpersonal skills. People on this site come from very different cultural backgrounds and/or neural constructions, and chances are that what is commonly understood in your context is not in others.
In my experience (see? that's the bad thing to do! :p), when you think you know how to address a situation you'll find a relevant, similar event to compare to. If you can't think of any, then maybe you're less familiar with this topic than you thought you were. And that's okay. We all have different sets of expertise. We can't know everything about interpersonal interactions, just like we can't know everything about every programming language this Earth has ever known.
If something is unclear for you about our backup policy you may drop by chat and ask our regular users, and the mods are of course here to answer your questions too.
