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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Well OP. Looks like your post resulted in a moderator resigning and the appointment of two new moderators in this community. As I’ve said previously, it was a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3, and not users deleting them after getting the answer.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
Wow! I just noticed that. Shit moves quickly on the tubes. Welcome our new overlords!
Thank you for the update!
a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3
…stretch by which party? in the sense that the post not really about self-hosting (and OP tried to use rule 3 in a stretched interpretation), or that the post was about self-hosting but moderator applied it in unnecessarily strict way? The way you phrased it seems like the former, but then why would that result in moderator resigning?
(I’m not a native English speaker so sorry if it should have been clear.)
To give you some context, I initially made this comment on OP’s post. Then I followed up with this comment after the resignation of a moderator on !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
I was referring to the former moderator’s very bizarre interpretation of Rule 3. You’ll see in the modlogs that many posts that were clearly about selfhosting getting removed under Rule 3.
It’s a particularly egregious case of “fuck you, got mine”
I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
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.
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
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.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
I think I should start checking if a poster has a history of regularly deleting posts/comments, before trying to give a useful answer.
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.
Wondering the same thing, maybe they think the information about their private server and network setups will be used against them?
I haven’t seen the posts (probably from deletion) but Lemmy to me is an invaluable source of smart Linux and selfhosters. Seems like a great place to ask questions for problem to me on the surface. Where should people like me go to if I need help? Genuinely asking
Where should people like me go to if I need help?
Here. Just don’t delete the question after you get your answer.
The way I read it is it’s not the asking questions that is the problem at all, it’s the deleting afterwards.
As much as I hate to say it OP, but when somebody ask a question they are asking for their own personal needs. And community is like this are actually here to serve an individuals questions. If that’s not the point of why you’re here then maybe what you should do is start a new thread world whatever it’s called here that’s called spell posted library or something like that so that way you can create a community fact sheet about how to do things. Why somebody delete stuff who knows people are weirdly private about openly public things. Maybe people feel embarrassed about asking your question or move it. It’s who the hell knows. But in the end it is their threat to ask questions and if you choose not to answer a question and then you don’t have to. However your time that you took to answer their question did not get wasted as they chose to take that advice and run with it. Just because your question now has to be read explain or your answer has to be reacclaimed in another thread doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have to be explained in another thread anyways. You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
Great suggestion. I think you’re both right - until we have such a library as you describe, we should try and keep this as a community resembling one. But a seperate resource actually designed for permanent knowledge hub would be more ideal.
You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
This is (presumably) true. I guess another problem with people deleting their stuff is that it’s “bad etiquette” on the poster’s part, as it creates the illusion that less productive exchange is happening on this sub than really is, which then makes visitors less likely to ask for help here. And i guess the OP is hoping that people who need help will do a quick search before posting about their problem.
You and I both know they won’t. The only thing doing searching is Google bots and AI
On reddit they had bots that would automatically repost the content of the post so it couldn’t be deleted.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
Op pls delete this post
mods please. it is giving me gas.
Has that been happening a lot here?
Lemmy in general, yes. Here in self hosted at least a couple of times that I’ve seen. Including earlier today. But I don’t interact on every post.
I only find out because sometimes I like to go back to posts I comment on and see what additional information people have offered. (There’s always something to learn.) Then I find the post has been deleted.
I absolutely detest how on lemmy deleting a post also nukes access to the comments. They’re still there, but there’s no way in many normally lemmy UI to get to them.
That seems like a client-side UI issue though. I’m sure you could get that request into the dev roadmap of your preferred client.
Unfortunately it seems most major Lemmy clients (https://join-lemmy.org/apps) are small or individual projects, some of which are closed source or use their public repos just for transparency. Seems like a relatively easy feature to build though if the APIs still spit out all the required data after deletion.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
or maybe a feature where posts cannot be deleted past a time period + amount of engagement.
Good point. If a post is two minutes old with no replies, may as will let folks change clean up their misclicks.
These would have to be added to Lemmy development, because currently I can delete a post of my own on a community on another instance and there isn’t a technical way to prevent it. Reporting and banning for behavior is tricky too unless you manage to remember the username of who posted it.
So, that’s an uphill battle at the development level and the moderation level.
What if I accidentally posted to the wrong community? Or posted something with a username/password in it? Or accidentally selected a picture of my penis wearing a little monocle and top hat to this community?
Requesting mod action would probably work.
Unless there is no active mod.
maybe just edit it to omit those info? (we don’t preserve edit history right?)
Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “deleted”.
I see now there were 3 posts removed in the past that all seen relevant to the community me. Going back I see ones I’ve read and interacted with.
Seems like it might be more mod actions to me, as others have pointed out. Maybe a more general self hosted community if the mod doesn’t want those sorts of (relevant to selfhosters but not specifically selfhost software announcements or whatever) posts here.
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.