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.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    10 hours ago

    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.

    • Summzashi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      9 hours ago

      All around you.

      I want to prove I’m not a baby so please downvote this comment.

      Edit: please stop you’re hurting my feelings

      • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Downvote my comment, so I can share your pain. I promise I will spend at least five seconds caring.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        9 hours ago

        Me too, go ahead - it doesn’t matter.

        What matters is when people scan your post history and check why you were downvoted, given the context of the comment. The community here is smaller, so if you post consistently, you can actually build a meaningful organic reputation (that is: other user’s opinions of you). Karma doesn’t matter. What you post, and how you engage with other users does.

    • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      45·
      1 day ago

      Sometimes down votes are a sign that you’re saying things people don’t want to hear or the right things but on a crazy instance, but sometimes down votes are a chance for self reflection where you have to ask yourself “Am I the asshole?” and in the latter case yeah I’m probably just going to delete it. No apologies though, I’m not looking to be a saint here.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      36·
      1 day ago

      I will say in their defense that some people delete their comments/posts not because they care about “karma” but because they now feel they were wrong and are genuinely embarrassed or think that its continued presence is just an annoyance to other people.

      That said, imo, unless you realize you’ve broken a rule in posting it or literally just posted by accident, it’s healthier for yourself and the community to simply e.g. edit in a correction and a “mea culpa”, even if you continue to get dogpiled for it.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        9 hours ago

        I have, in the several years I’ve been here, deleted only a handful of comments - pretty much exclusively as a result of me being in a terrible mood and/or too drunk and commenting something very stupid or dickish, then reading it the next morning and going “what the fuck was I doing 🤦‍♂️”. That is thankfully vanishingly rare for me lol

    • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zipEnglish
      20·
      24 hours ago

      As someone with social anxiety for some people seeing a large negative social response to something you said or did, even if just abstractly represented by a number, can be pretty distressing 🤷🏻‍♂️

      I generally leave stuff up unless its misleading or something, but I can empathize with why someone would take it down

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
      3·
      22 hours ago

      The other day somebody asked me a question and I couldn’t be bothered to deal with them, but later on I decided to answer in earnest and deleted the previous response.

    • brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      I’ve had discussions here with people that don’t want down votes, like in YouTube. There are instances that have them disabled.

    • TachyonTele@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I’ve seen it a few times. It’s stupid. Why bother participating if you’re just going to take your ball home, so to speak.

  • MyBrainHurts@piefed.caEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    I get that but there’s also a certain “ugh” when a bunch of .ml folks find a post and want to yell at you about it.

    • Summzashi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      Honestly the folks at .ml are actually kinda chill compared to that one instance with the bear.

      • MyBrainHurts@piefed.caEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        For sure. But it’s just tiring to get notifications for hours of someone yelling about shit libs or something.

    • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      You can block them once and for all. It’s like they don’t exist.

      • MyBrainHurts@piefed.caEnglish
        3·
        22 hours ago

        Yeah but the fediverse is still so small that I would miss a lot of content.

        My current set up is to watch for .ml posters/comms and avoid commenting. For other, less immediately obvious folks, I’ll tag them with a pukey emoji after an unpleasant interaction and generally avoid engaging.

        The thing that set up has really brought home is that while there are many folks I find aggressively ignorant, they may still post fun stuff in more neutral, non politics subs. Really eye opening how much I can vehemently disagree with someone in one context and have them be perfectly fine and even funny in another.

        • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
          3·
          19 hours ago

          I don’t miss it one bit, personally. The positives to blocking the whole instance far outweighs the negatives, imho. There are tons of other communities, and it helps make room for such things as poetry (with barely any subscribers and almost no commenters) to show up.

          Ofc you do you - there may be a specific community that you feel that you cannot do without. Perhaps you can help by reposting stuff from it elsewhere.

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    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 Jerboa?) 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.**

    • Grimy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      21 hours ago

      The comments under the post is content that other users contribute to. 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 imo.

      • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        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.

      • la93@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        4·
        21 hours ago

        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.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    I was on reddit for 10 years and have been on lemmy for 3. I’m still not sure what this is really supposed to mean.

    There is absolutely a “lifetime” karma score available for users, its just not centered in peoples bios like it is on lemmy. But it absolutely exists…

    And if people want to go for high scores more power to them. Get that dopamine where you can queen.

    • chortle_tortle@mander.xyzEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      I think their point is that on reddit, life time karma impacts the comment placement order; showing more comments from higher karma accounts. So I guess weirdos would delete comments that started to get negative votes on reddit so they weren’t seen as undesirable by the algorithm.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Elaborate pls. I know Piefed tracks the user’s votes under Attitude, but I’m not aware of tracking of other people’s votes on users posts and comments. Am I missing something?

      • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        Total per-account upvotes minus downvotes value is tracked for everyone, it is just hidden by choice in Lemmy. Other softwares have other approaches, Piefed has the “attitude” you mentioned. Kbin used to just show the full “karma” value, I’m not sure if Mbin still does. It doesn’t appeal to me so I don’t keep up with development.

  • Nytefyre@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I think this is probably the usual reason, rather than downvotes or whatever.

  • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
    4·
    1 day ago

    Not that I care about it, but mBin definitely does have a lifetime reputation score you can find on someone’s profile if you really care to see it

  • itrealgood@mander.xyzEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I delete posts older than two days if they didn’t contribute something worth looking up again later