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.
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 (
VoyagerJerboa?) 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 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.
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.