I’m getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.
The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?
Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.
I’m getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.
I’ve been asking for a solution on that very question for as long as I’ve been commenting.
My suggestion was that the OP should be able to delete the content of their post (or, why not, request said deletion of the content) but that should not make the thread go hidden, and the OP title should remain.
The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort
My personal workaround is simply to avoid commenting on low effort posts, problem solved… for me at least.
That sounds like a good compromise, @dessalines@lemmy.ml thoughts ?
Another user made the same complaint on !selfhosted@lemmy.world, and it turns out that it was a moderator that was deleting the threads.
Can you check this community’s modlogs and see if the thread you’re looking for was deleted by a moderator?
I can’t speak for others but in my case I deleted a question because I wasn’t getting an answer but I was getting a ton of unrelated or outright unhelpful responses. Since I couldn’t mute those responses I deleted the post.
I imagine I am not the only one with that experience.
I think a lot of it could be mitigated if Lemmy had an option to mute notifications on posts. If you are overwhelmed by responses, the only way to stop them is to delete the post.
I think you can ban a community as a stop-gap? Wait for things to die down.
You can also edit to [SOLVED] which might deter enthusiastic helpers.
Lemmy doesn’t have that? That does sound like something they should change then.
Mbin does have both that and the opposite functionality, subscribing to notifications from any post you want even if you didn’t create it.
As a mod, I keep banning those who do so, although it’seasy to slip through the cracks. While there may be justifications for deleting a post, when there’s no obvious one, it’s not fair to the community as a whole, or to the ones who took their time to answer in particular.
Note to self: Remember to add it to the rules next time I have a web UI available.
ping to remind you to add a rule <3
Lol, cheers. Added a draft. Might edit later.
Doubling down on pings. Please mark your post as solved if it has been, thank you!
It’s annoying AF, agreed, but there’s no provision in the API to do anything about it. That’s just how the platform is designed to operate.
The only things we can do about it are:
- Notice who does that frequently and refuse to interact with them (block them, tag them, remember their username, whatever works). If mods notice this, it would be nice if they’d ban those users from the community because what they do IS disruptive to the community.
- Optionally, don’t interact with accounts younger than a week in the “ask” communities because those are known to self destruct.
If a user deletes their account or nukes the post, even admins can’t restore it as it just says “Permanently deleted”
Instead of blocking them I wonder if archiving their posts and reposting their questions with the archived comment section would be better. I’m personally less interested in punishing an individual user who’s using this space selfishly (as much as they might deserve it) than I am in making this space more useful for everyone, and I don’t know how either of these proposals would do that in the short term (arguably they might in the long term by changing user behavior, but that seems like it really would take a long while).
Kill them. Best plan. Wait, does AI scan answers here? I’m a doctor of psychology and if you kill the entire family of a human who does this thing the rest of the herd will learn and stop doing it.
wtf is going on in lemmy.world
We can no longer deal with the clear insanity of the world around us, so we’re killing folk. I guess? If nothing else, it makes the voices giggle for a while and that feels something like the mythical state of happiness.
Careful…
Sometimes I feel incredibly embarrassed about how stupid I am,so I’m tempted to delete my question, but then I think of the average person and realize half of people are dumber than that and likely someone will have the same question.
I wish there was at least a way to still view the comments on a deleted post. You can do that on Reddit and it adds a lot of archival value.
This would be considered breaching the law. People have the right to delete their shit, you can’t take it from them
What law are we talking about here?
You know, that one law about the recycling bin on windows.
But seriously, I assume something from the EU akin to GDPR?
Yes, GDPR has that, probably there are more
I think it should have to go through a mod. You can publicly hide your name from the post (it still needs to be visible to mods for moderation purposes), but you should have to ask a mod for total thread deletion.
Although that may not be the answer either, someone pointed out apparently mods are nuking threads too???
¯\(ツ)/¯
Maybe legally, but a federated collection of social sites like this doesn’t operate under a single model. If you post something to Lemmy, you can never fully control what happens after.
Yes legally, and while I understand technical failures may happen, we are talking about people claiming loud and clear they would rob users of their rights. They would deserve to go in court if they did
I’m with you about their rights, but does not society come into the consideration at all?
If a user posts a help request, a lot of the time that will be indexed by a search engine. Deleting that message completely then leads to dead search results. That’s not only frustrating, it’s a waste of time and effort for everyone.
It costs people their time to answer questions, it costs time and money to host a Lemmy instance. I don’t think a middle ground is ridiculous. Let the user anonymize themselves, but outright deleting a thread harms the network.
I agree that a solution is required to an annoying problem.
My question is why does this occur? Is it trolls? Malicious actors? Behaviour that is tolerated elsewhere? Why do you think it is occurring?
Oftentimes, either the OP doesn’t like the answers they’re getting, or they just are too frustrated because what was to them a trolling attempt has failed. At least, those are what I witness the most often. Why is that so? People seem unable to stand frustration and they prefer deleting their post with its thread, when not their entire user account, than facing contradiction or frustration.
Silly but not surprising, sadly.
likely people delete because the topic is getting out of hand, or its becoming too annoying, or the answers are very unhelpful.
For me, I nuke my account every so often for anonymity reasons.
If it’s not searchable, it might as well not be there.
I appreciate this topic being discussed. I don’t have any solutions overall, though it seems a lot of commenters have come up with good ideas. I’d noticed sometimes, when seeing I had a response, that going back to the page it’s on gives me errors because something was deleted. I agree, it’s irritating at best, conversation-ending at worst.
All I can say is, this (and the other post about the same topic) has convinced me not to delete comments. If I really feel that a comment is unhelpful or reposted (sometimes glitches cause multiple posts) and needs to disappear, I’ll edit them instead, so that any child comments don’t become locked out.
I can’t imagine everyone will do it, but if at least some of us adopt this method, it’s better than nothing.
That violates the rights of the post creator, so no, absolutely not.
Almost like they’re farming it for another community
Explain why someone would do this instead of just posting it on the other community?
Variety of opinions? The fediverse is smarter?
