Over the past two months, I noted a peculiar phenomenon. The activity of answering questions about visited places doesn’t add to to the points but deducts some.
I was suspecting this bizarre behaviour. So, yesterday, I opened my contributions and answered some quick questions about the places visited in the previous month.
I refrained from answering repeat questions.
In the end, I received the usual notification, the point count went up by that much amount.
But surprise, after around fifteen minutes, not only that fresh credit vanished, but there was a further reduction in that.
There isn’t any automatic deletion of history through the settings.
Thus, answering questions appears to be a risky activity and doing that may lead to the loss of some points instead of any gain.
My guess is, most of the questions are a repeat. Any variance in the previous answer and the recent one is causing the loss.
May be you haven’t noticed that there are a few updates to how your answers to questions about places on Google Maps are stored and how you need to enable a setting to answer future questions:
If you delete a specific answer, or if you delete the activity for the day, or have the 3 month/18 month deletion enabled it will delete those answers.
If you delete answers to questions during any time frame, your answer will be deleted from Google Maps, and as a result, your Local Guides points will be removed for those contributions.