Please don’t expect the community to give you answers to your questions which you then delete right afterwards. Those of us who put time into answering your questions are not doing so just to serve your personal needs, we are here to help build a community knowledge base that others can search and reference.
This has become a chronic issue with Lemmy and its starting to feel like it’s a waste of time to answer questions.
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It doesn’t make sense, either. There’s no rational reason to delete a thread after the question has been answered.
Even if it wasn’t actually a person but was an AI agent asking questions so it can scrape the data from the answers, there’s no real utility in deleting the posts after receiving responses. It just seems so weird.
Could they be astroturfing, looking for a specific solution to fill search engines with their own product placement, then deleting because most of the comments are other FOSS solutions?
Companies already do it with Reddit, so it’s not surprising, their error is to think that the niche open source federated alternative to reddit would make their bs work
It might be to stop the damn notifications you keep getting whenever anyone posts to a thread you started. Also it’s reasonable to think discussion forums are in some sense ephemeral. If you want a persistent store of knowledge, try Wikipedia. Lemmy could also host wikis if it’s worthwhile, like reddit does.
Also it’s reasonable to think discussion forums are in some sense ephemeral
This is 100% wrong. This isn’t Discord or chat. People expect forums to appear in online search results, i.e. be persistent.
Uncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.
I don’t get email notifications, but that number next to the icon changing is annoying. I have a few old responses that I’ve left “unread” on purpose, so I’m reminded to get around to dealing with them (look at some url or whatever). When the number changes, that means there are actual new responses, which after a day or two tend to be useless depending on the topic. So I’d rather shut them off.
If it’s easier to delete the post guess what people will do.
How is it easier to delete a post every time than to set preferences to not be emailed just once, then you never have to again?
How do I do that for just that post? And how do I ignore replies for that post so I didn’t get any other notices?
if you don’t want replies, just don’t post. everyone will be better off than if you are deleting posts. actually it’s the easiest thing to do.
that being said. are you guilty of deleting your posts after they had discussions? because if so, I’ll just block you because you are taking away value from the community, not adding to it
Why don’t you like getting replies? That’s the fun part!
Do something once? Ew.
Do something infinitely? 🥵💦
sounds logical, the biggest logical, even
Ive never heard anything more logical in my life, and I am a cold unthinking machine running on pure logic
Checkmate
I don’t think most people think of this to be ephemeral. First of all, this replaces reddit and we all know how valuable reddit was when searching for issues. Second of all, this is also kind of like forum, and not many people would think of a forum to be ephemeral. Not everything save-worthy has to be wikipedia kind of stuff.
I have no idea what you are using to browse Lemmy because the only notification I get is a number next to my profile icon in web browser or Thunder. And that’s often delayed by several days so I frequently look through my own old posts to find replies because don’t get reliable notifications.
no. everything shpuld be petsisted, which is why i donate to the internet archive.
Even misinformation? CSAM?
i had to lookup what the acronym csam meant… c’mon - you know what i mean. i am talking about words, the context of the conversation. but to your first point, if a post had misinformation, backing that up so historians can see and have evidence of the behavior of this time. You can flag it but i think there is a lot of history that is washed away.
but no - i dont mean illegal pictures of children - this post was about deleting help posts.
Holy bad faith Batman.
Sure, that’s why Google made an exclusivity deal with wikipedia instead of reddit to train their ai for any organic user level reviews/discussions on anything.
Somebody pointed out that the person might be afraid they gave so much info that their post gets de-anonymized - but IMO people afraid of that shouldn’t post on public forums to begin with.
It’s not that complicated. New user gets an answer, feels like the post isn’t relevant anymore, and deletes it without thinking.
Still a massive dick move, but still.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
What the hell is the purpose?
I think some people are being a bit of privacy freaks, so they don’t want to leave their data online. I still think its stupid tho cuz Ive posted questions, get a good response but forget after a while. Then when I do go back to remind myself, its deleted.
It’s probably that. I get it. But it still undermines the good will of the community. I’m tempted to delete my original comment for the gag.
They’re not doing this
Wondering the same thing, maybe they think the information about their private server and network setups will be used against them?
I think I should start checking if a poster has a history of regularly deleting posts/comments, before trying to give a useful answer.
No, they don’t.
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
that’s a lot of rule 3
Looks like it’s hybridsarcasims favorite rule
Wow crazy I couldn’t imagine that this community gets enough posts to warrant so aggressively enforcing rules about the content.
Some people think that keeping a community laser focused attracts more readers through quality. It’s an ideal that I respect, but I’ve never really observed that to be true in reality.
If you’re reading this @HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz consider this my polite feedback that I completely get what you’re trying to accomplish but you might be working harder than you need to be.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Lmao I guess I should start by reading the community rules.
Exactly, I could understand it on the huge subreddits with one question per minute, but here is so silent…
Plus, as a user, when a mod deletes a post that I took over ten minutes to write, I go “fuck It” and stop contributing altogether (this also includes replying to other posts)
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
https://lemmy.world/post/39025760
wtf? Half the post is nuked even after being locked. I don’t even see how such a small community can be so stuck up about relevancy and purity washing selfhosted as if we all own our own DNS registrars and can do outbound SMTP.
I assume they did not read the post very clearly.
It’s a major pet peeve of mind when places get overly zealous about moderating what is on or off topic when the volume of posts doesn’t warrant it. Especially when there has already been some discussion on the posts.
Had that same thing happen to me recently too
Mod had deleted my posts that I feel were relevant as not relevant.
Just glanced at it, but noticed a user (ayyy) was temp banned here 24 days ago for apparently telling a user to kys, then appointed mod here 45 minutes ago.
Wat?
Looked like admins did it so could have been anywhere.
I don’t get it why would selfhosting-related hardware questions be irrelevant? If we are talking about 14tb drives having weird behaviour, I’d say this is the right place to ask.
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
Yeah it’s more than likely the same people doing it all the time.
Edit: either that or AI bots farming information from Lemmy to feed their databases.
None of that happened
Could this be like the BS we were seeing earlier in the year on one of the meme comms (I think) where users would post something, then delete their account afterwards, nuking the whole thread.
could be, I think when deleting your account there is a checkbox whether to delete all your posts abd comments
I just want to apologize for being the person who asks questions and then doesn’t respond to the comments. I get overwhelmed D: but I’d never delete my post, what’s the purpose in that?
Someone may have the same question in the future and there will be answers. You not responding is not that bad but it is even better that you do and provide an update to your situation, if you wish.
Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.
or at least change the title to [solved] with a link to the comment that worked.
The Arch Linux forum make people do that.
Someone may have the same question in the future and there will be answers.
With 8.4 billion people on this planet, I can’t be the only one asking the question.
For technical issues I’ve come to the conclusion that if there are no other people asking the same question, then I need to re-think my approach, because I’m probably doing something silly.
Exactly.
That kind of thinking is too advanced for the general populace
and if everyone who asks that question has that mindset then we end up with no answers longterm.
its annoying to scroll through 15 threads asking the same thing looking for an answer, but its infinitely worse to find no threads related to what you’re trying to do.
I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
I don’t get it either, but it was also a big problem on Reddit for years.
On Reddit especially, it usually was people asking a question, then having their alt account respond with whatever they were trying to shill, and just doing that over and over again.
It’s just another type of advertising to them. Ask a question trying to solve a problem, then use your alt account to shill your own solution.
Doesn’t work that way on lemmy: if they delete the post, then the alt’s shilling disappears, too.
Frankly, I don’t think users should have that power.
I’m not against it, post something it the wrong place, or during a bender. Would be kinda cool if lemmy tracked user starts on deletes like it does on posts and comments
I’m still undecided about their own text (deleting comments or post text disrupts the conversation but there’s valid reasons), but I don’t think the OP of a thread should have any control over the existence of that full comment thread.
Maybe some form of engagement or time limit would serve. If the post is empty or low engagement and less than 2 days old, it can go. After that it’s up to mod?
Or just do it like reddit did, where you can delete your post content and remove your username from it, but the thread and comments remain.
Though with how the fediverse works, it’s possible to spin up a custom instance that highlights deleted content instead of deleting it, meaning the attempt to get rid of it can be what brings it more attention if anyone has decided to do it. Just like with vote identities, they aren’t anonymous and there are instances/sites that just show who voted for what.
I think it’s more so that they can post the same thing frequently, hoping that it gets burned into peoples’ brains.
Because the moderators will ban them if they don’t.
Can you expand on this? Why do you think this?
Hadn’t noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
“fuck you got mine”
There are a couple of accounts who were doing this regularly for some reason on all sorts of different topics. But I would need to see more evidence of this happening. As someone else mentioned it could be mods or a couple rare cases or all sorts of things.
Lately in all of the lemmys like each time I go to look at my replies (if I ever get one), the reply, my comment, and the thread are all gone. I’m often thinking it’s mods just nuking threads because of inflammation or whatever.
Weird, I see that pretty rarely and is usually because the post broke some rule (offtopic, duplicate, etc)
Maybe I’m just attracted to rule breaker threads. <3
Not so much in this Lemmy, other ones really.
I don’t get it – if something’s not like offensive but just irrelevant why not let downvotes bury it rather than delete it?
I wonder if someone is trying out an AI or something and seeing the results. Then deleting. More evidence will pop up eventually.
My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later. In reality, if someone was truly concerned about avoiding doxxing, they’d just switch accounts. Because anyone can spin up a single-user instance, federate to scrape content from all the communities they want, and then simply refuse to respect delete requests.
Because when you delete something on a Lemmy instance, the instance simply sends a delete request to all the other instances that federated with it. But those other instances can easily ignore the delete request and retain the deleted content for as long as they want.
That’s also part of why it’s so stupid that AI crawlers are scraping Lemmy and thrashing instance owners’ rate limits. The AI crawler could just set up a new instance and automatically gather the content via federation. But instead, they just send crawler bots. Because fuck the instance owners, I got my content either way and using a crawler bot didn’t require me to learn how federation works.
My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later.
I really don’t understand these people. If you don’t want to be doxxed or scraped, stop participating online. It’s that simple. Even if you participate in a private sub, it will eventually get scrapped.
Huh. That’s a smart idea (AI federated instance). I imagine Lemmy is too small for it to be on Big AIs radar very much (just yet)
I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
They didn’t
It happens on reddit all the time as well
No it doesn’t. If someone on Reddit deletes there post, the comments are all still visible.
This is the same thing as posting on a forum a question, then saying never mind I figured it out WITHOUT STATING THE ANSWER! When googling shit and coming across this back in the day I would get more mad at those than my issue.
That’s even more infuriating than when you used Google to find a thread where someone asks the exact question you have, and there is only one response and it’s someone saying “use Google”.
“use Google”.
It makes me cringe when I see it in a forum. *Imagine you come to a forum designed to help people do <Topic x>, you ask a question, and the response is 'Google exists. Piss off."
The spiritual heir to ‘RTFM’
I’ve lost count of the snarky ‘let me google that for you’ links I’ve found doing niche searches in the pre-AI days.
Especially when it builds you up over multiple posts that make it sound more and more like your exact problem.
Came across that so many fucking times that it’s burned into my psyche. I will go out of my way to list the answer, especially now google is a wet pile of shit technically
Op pls delete this post
mods please. it is giving me gas.
Yes! This drives me crazy. I will sometimes go back and edit posts to add more info months later.
We have all been in a situation where we are looking for a very specific answer, and the answer only exists in one obscure forum from a decade ago that has the exact info we are looking for.
It’s hard enough to ensure lemmy’s long-term fidelity without people axing their own content.
Oh, I thought this was about me since I just asked for file transfer stuff but you’re specifically talking about deleting it right after. It happened to me on asklemmy where the user deleted it right after
Asking questions in a public forum (after searching imo) is generally a positive thing. Answers are then public and the next person with the question can find the answer. That sort of behaviour should be encouraged, and no one will ever complain about it imo.
It was a mod
I haven’t noticed many posts deleted by the user themselves. I see a lot of ‘deleted by user’ comments. I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact. That way, someone searching can cross-moginate whatever their issues are with what solved the issue for me. Maybe the user deleting the post once it was solved is embarrassed they asked a supposedly ‘stupid’ question?
I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact.
You (and folks who do the same) are unsung heroes. Thank you.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m a hero. It just seems a ‘thank you’ and a [SOLVED] would be a common courtesy, especially if someone took the time, and had the patience to muck through my feeble brain to tweeze out exactly what the issue was. LOL
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
Pretty sure lots of the “deleted” posts were actually removed by the mods. Rule 3 seems to be a popular justification for post removal in this community, and it basically outlaws all of the “my server is having this issue, anyone got any ideas” types of posts that OP has cited.
While I agree it’s popular for removing posts, maybe it shouldn’t be. If we want users to organically find Lemmy, one of the best ways to do that is the same way users end up at Reddit: By googling an error code, and finding a five year old “Edit: I figured it out. Here is what I did” post.
Or maybe we just need to make (and properly support) a community that is dedicated to those kinds of posts. If a “my server is broken plz help” post isn’t relevant to /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world, maybe we need to make a /c/SelfHostedSupport to redirect the Rule 3 posts to.
Yeah I think this is a tool worth having for mods. Maybe going through deleted posys and seeing who are repeat offenders.
To me, that isn’t building a community, that’s extracting from one. It’s no better than AI scraping. You got your answer and then keep it for yourself.
Quote ppl you answer.
that will help somewhat in the future when lemmy gets its shit together, but since I came to lemmy deleted posts cannot be loaded at all, even though the server still has the comments
Quote ppl you answer.
indeed
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
True
