cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/54923731
Some accounts are deleting their posts after a few downvotes. It’s devastating on communities like c/asklemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t track an account’s karma like reddit. So, all downvotes will be isolated to your post or comment and won’t affect your account—unless you wrote something truly horrible.
Remember lemmy is a community effort. Deleting a post also removes all comments on it. So you are not only robbing the effort others put in, you are actively removing knowledge from the fediverse. Others won’t be able to find it through search and lemmy will seem lonelier than it already is.
Just don’t post any real shit post in the sublemmy shitpost. That will get you a ban. Only picture of fairies and unicorns are allowed for these poor sensitive souls. I though lemmy would be more educated than reddit but unfortunately there are a small group of loud little bitches everywhere ruining the world for everyone else.
People actually cared about Reddit karma?
karma is heavily abused by botters, spammers, and used as an excuse by reddit/mods to filter out people they dont like.
That’s one of fediverse’s most underused selling points. Karma farming is impossible here.
What if we aren’t coming from Reddit? I had good karma way before the internet ever existed because I tried my best to treat the world around me with love and respect. Now that I’m older and knee-deep in the world’s tech I find I’ve become a bit irascible. Maybe that’s more a product of age than social engineering. I hope so.
Then you simply won’t feel the usual pressure to perform that people worried about karma feel before posting anything.
Maybe that’s why people on Lemmy are also sort of extra curmudgeonly. They can be without facing algorithmic consequences.
RESPECTABILITY POLITICS IS EVERYTHINNNNNNGGGG
Deleting a post doesn’t delete the comments, it just makes then undiscoverable/inaccessible. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5525
So this problem should be solvable with only changes to client code then?
PieFed allows you to see the comments on deleted posts for exactly this reason.
On one hand, yes I find it irritating the way people treat their profile like some kind of extension of their personality and only post comments that will be well received.
One the other hand, I don’t really see much “knowledge” being removed from the fediverse. I don’t really understand how this behavior is devastating to communities.
I’ve deleted multiple posts for different reasons:
- answers were crap (mostly offtopic, missing the point, simply attacking me instead of the question, etc.)
- mbin doesn’t support muting notifications from topics, so I’d just keep getting them, so it was simpler to delete than wait for people to stop talking
- I got my answers and it wasn’t that important
I don’t give 2 shits about “points”. You could make this the most downvoted comment on the planet and I would leave it up (if I didn’t get notifications)
Devastating? Jeez.
If you want to make a code change proposal, go ahead and make one. Otherwise, deletion is a feature offered to Lemmy users to use as they see fit. In fact some earlier (unrelated) proposals to speed up the software were rejected on the grounds that deletion is required to actually scrub the entry from the database, rather than simply making it inaccessible through the web. The scrubbing requirement may have been abandoned by now though.
I half remember a Lemmy client (Voyager?) with a user setting to automatically delete any post or comment that the user makes after 7 days or something. It had nothing to do with karma. I didn’t use that setting but it seemed reasonable to me. Lemmy is a discussion forum not a long term archive.
I do like the idea of adding a wiki feature to Lemmy, to hold info of long term value to a community. Reddit already has something like that.
The comments under the post is content that other users contribute too. It’s very frustrating to be having what amounts to a conversation in the comments just for OP to thrash the whole thing. There’s also the problem that a lot of deleted posts are bots probably building a “unique” dataset to sell after (just a hypothesis).
No reason why we can’t just have the body and the username removed from the post while keeping the comment section.
Yes I see what you’re getting at. IDK how a software change proposal would be received. It could be that the devs think that the other comments on the thread could somehow identify the original poster or the topic. On at least one reddit subgroup there’s a bot that does that on purpose (copies the original post and maybe the author name into a thread comment). The reasons for the bot might be specific to the subreddit.
I like the suggestion in your last sentence. Some deletions might be humans knowing their posts are being used to build unique data sets to do whatever the miner wants to do with them.
I figured it was just instances culling old posts without a lot of engagement. I’ve had posts or comments that I’ve made get deleted and I didn’t request them
Don’t tell me what to do. Also, thanks for the info!
Is that why??? Oh man I was wondering why some people did that. Deleting their posts before I even have time to reply
Internet points aren’t the only reason people delete their posts/comments, though?
I think people should think seriously about deleting posts, but comments that don’t contribute to the discussion for whatever reason definitely have a shelf life.
And that’s aside from the old “a comment you made 10 years ago in another life gets you fired/cancelled” issues due to times changing, some shitlord quoting you out of context, etc, etc.
I don’t think it’s just downvotes that are the reason posts are deleted. What’s being ignored, is what follows after downvotes. And that is, users being antagonistic over nuanced posts because the posts don’t contain the kind of brainrot-meme-lamejoke kind of content that is the norm.
And it is never a good feeling getting dogpiled on for absolutely no reason other than just not appeasing to whatever expectancy that is there. Additionally, when there isn’t enough activity aside from that, people can feel like ‘what’s the point?’ because they simply don’t have enough numbers of people engaging.
So this creates this discouragement within them to keep bothering.
I think this is probably the usual reason, rather than downvotes or whatever.
