Today I got a -190 rep change due to a "user was removed" occurence. While sad, it doesn't bother me that much. However, I observed strange circumstances.
- It wasn't one user that was removed but several - how likely can it be that so many users decided to remove their accounts or were removed by moderators?
- Two of those users were askers of quite recent questions I answered: this and this. Again I find it unlikely that they both decided to remove their accounts - the questions were rather well received and I didn't notice anything bad going on. One of them, maybe, but two at once?
- There was also at least one suspension due to "voting irregularities". I can see the vote counts on questions and answers and can somehow see a connection with the removals - I haven't tracked the other removed users though.
Overall, I'm curious about what's going on: has something changed regarding to the site policy recently, is this some error that's just been coped with, or what? I don't expect a full explanation like "yes, those were sock-puppet accounts related to user XXX" as that would clearly violate the privacy policy here (although I wouldn't mind such a clear explanation ;)
I would appreciate any remarks (I guess I'm mostly interested in what moderators have to say about it) on the situation in order to better understand what's going on and to learn more about the subtleties of this site's functioning.