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.
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.
On reddit they had bots that would automatically repost the content of the post so it couldn’t be deleted.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
What the hell is the purpose?
Wondering the same thing, maybe they think the information about their private server and network setups will be used against them?
Ol6oi
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’d be helpful to put some links to known good resources for common questions in the e.g. about page.
Also are you suggesting we don’t ask or don’t ask and then delete?
I believe it’s don’t ask then delete.
Op pls delete this post
mods please. it is giving me gas.
I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
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.
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.
Because the moderators will ban them if they don’t.
Can you expand on this? Why do you think this?
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
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.
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.
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
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
Mod had deleted my posts that I feel were relevant as not relevant.
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 @[email protected] 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.
@[email protected] Just to add, I would say working to the detriment of the community through the deletions.
Locking would make more sense, along with redirecting to specific communities that you feel would be more relevant.
As I see it, I think people post here for what could be considered tangential because it is more popular than similar communities. I think this very post shows that the users have been perfectly fine with the posts being made, and are bothered by the information (effectively) disappearing with deletions.
If the mod team does not want those sort of posts here, of course thats fine. But it is kind of shitty to delete them, especially with so much interaction already there. I’d encourage locking them and redirecting through a mod comment instead. If you can’t think of a more appropriate community for them, its likely they can’t either, which is why they posted here in the first place.
Just my 2¢.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Considering your application of the rules, I really dont think thats what you want. Unless you want me to go ahead and restore posts that (like other users per this thread) seem relevant enough to be here.
Quite a response to “here’s a way this could work better for everyone”, too.
But if its what you want, sure, I’ll do it.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If it’s easier to delete the post guess what people will do.
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
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!
Your comment isn’t popular, but we all know the rule: “the best thing needs to be the easy thing”, since people will often choose what’s easy and fast vs what’s ultimately better. We see this in security all the time (hello-oo NPM).
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?
Holy bad faith Batman.
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.
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.
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)
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)
