Neil Meyer has posted this answer to one of the questions about minor key harmony: Minor key and its chords
The chords are:
- Tonic (minor) (A-C-E)
- Supertonic (diminished) (B-D-F)
- Mediant (augmented) (C-E-G♯)
- Subdominant (minor) (D-F-A)
- Dominant (major) (E-G♯-B)
- Submediant (major) (F-A-C)
- Leading-tone (diminished) (G♯-B-D)
Since that is a great answer to the question, I personally would not downvote this. However, it has four downvotes due to some reason. Can someone explain the problem?
There is no problem. Up- and Downvotes are entirely the responsibility of those who cast them. Without any comments, the only assumption we can make about downvotes is that they are for the reason the tooltip gives when you hover over the down arrow:
This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful
From an objective perspective, comparing that post to the top voted answer, the difference is obvious. Richard's answer gives the chords, extensive reasoning and explanation, as well as a follow up link to documentation.
In my opinion an answer that is only a list is almost never a good answer.
Questions that seek list answers are discouraged, e.g. here and here, for a variety of reasons, and there is a good chance that such questions are off-topic. Answers to off-topic questions are likely to garner downvotes.
Questions that aren't actively seeking list answers are unlikely to be adequately answered by a list; in most cases a list does not explain anything.
The goal of Stack Exchange is to provide high-quality answers to (ideally) high-quality questions. The voting system is supposed to be a way of separating the good from the bad. This may not always work as well as we would like, but answers that are simple lists of names or terms surely fall short of the mark.
