I have noticed this is occuring more and more. It is a problem that started to crop up on reddit but now I’m seeing here more often. Do you not want other people to benefit from the answers you received? This community is kind of pointless if you just get an answer and wipe it from the web.
You must log in or # to comment.
When you find them, go check the user’s other posts and comments.
I find that often, they have deleted all their content and sometimes even their account. This is especially the case in Reddit where people seem to have gotten enough
I did it because I never got an actual helpful answer anyway. I couldn’t disable replies and people kept responding with either the same thing or blatantly wrong/unhelpful answers and I was tired of being bothered by it.
I had something similar in the past.
My solution was to report my own post and ask the mod to lock the replies which they thankfully did.
No idea why there isnt a way for me to do it to my own post though.
Yeah, not being able to disable replies is very annoying on Lemmy. Would be a great feature to add.
Had my post removed for “off topic” in self hosting because it was about open wrt and they claimed it was a hardware question when in fact open wrt is software.
Yeah, this has always bugged me too. It slows down our accumulation of old content, which is one of the big draws of platforms like this. People love to go to reddit for answers to questions originally asked years ago, and they could potentially use Lemmy for that too, if our backstock got substantial enough. As a much smaller userbase, though, we kinda need every thread we can get.
And I’ve already had this happen a few times. The search engine I use (Kagi) tends to rank fediverse platforms higher when they have a good answer, though it’s rare they ever have something relevant.
But I’ve gone to multiple posts on lemmy where the content was straight up gone, or where the main post was available, but the comment(s) that provided an actual answer were deleted.
I will say, you’ll see a lot of users on lemm.ee who deleted their content, because lemm.ee shut down, and there’s no way to retroactively delete your content after the fact once the instance is no longer being hosted, so I know a lot of people didn’t want to leave any kind of permanent digital trail of their account data and just deleted the whole thing.
Hell, even I did with my lemm.ee account before it was shut down, but I hadn’t really answered many questions there that would be useful to most people. It was a lot more political debate than helpful commentary.
I didn’t delete it, the mods apparently didnt like the answer (or question) and ‘shadow’ deleted it? I wasnt given a reason for its deletion.
I’m guessing that they are maybe worried about someone trying to use past posts to identify them, but:
-
That’s a really ineffective way to do that, as someone who wants to can still harvest that information if they want to run an instance that records stuff. I suspect that if someone hasn’t already, they’ll probably make a website to display a user’s deleted posts.
-
There is an actually effective way to do this. Use a throwaway account. Maybe it would be better for Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin to have native support for throwaway accounts or something, but unlike the above, that is immune to having an instance out there log and expose all your past posts and correlate them. And it isn’t a hassle for everyone else who would like to refer to the information later. If you do do this, though, please be nice and don’t grab nice usernames that someone else might want to use on your home instance…use “throwawaySomethingSomething” or something like that.
EDIT: I just realized that not everyone might know what a throwaway account is, though the term was commonly used on Reddit. It’s just an account that you create for a single use, like to make one post, and then “throw it away”, never use it again, so that it isn’t associated with your regular account.
Before I switch to running pifed I noticed that lemmy would still show posts, at least to me as an admin, that where removed elsewhere. It’s not a problem unique to federated things, nothing says anything you delete on a central platform is actually gone either, but federated systems are even more impossible to properly remove things from since any given node could store copies.
So yeah, throwaway accounts if you don’t want it associated is the way to go.
-
In reddit, I’d discovered that some people would karma-farm that way…
Annoying-as-hell, when the deletion of a post doesn’t delete the karma-farmer’s accured-from-that points, in my eyes: it distorts things in favor of the machiavellians…
No idea how these instances deal-with that kind of thing…
( I’ve not deleted any post, after getting an answer: just trying help with info : )
_ /\ _
One time I asked a question because of someone who was being creepy IRL and didn’t want to risk said person coming across it by chance and thinking I asked that question bc of them, no matter how unlikely that was. Asked on a niche subreddit. The question itself was asked in a way that in no way indicated why I was asking, so to an outsider it just looked like a normal question that I deleted just because I got my answer.
I wouldn’t delete otherwise.
What would really help is a way to disable replies… (Edit: meant the notifications)
I don’t make posts here, but I’ve hesitated posting big news articles before, because people keep making top level comments days/weeks later and they keep coming in as notifications.
Some people on here desperately feel the need to reply back to every notification, so I’m assuming a lot of the deletes are just people who feel satisfied with the answers they already got
I’m against disabling replies entirely, but for disabling notifications. Once a post is out there and other people are participating in the conversation, it’s not just yours anymore.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. Just didn’t say it right
Piefed allows you to disable notifications for a post at any time
I just assume they got a few answers they didn’t like and didn’t want to get any more negative feedback.
Given how AI is scraping the web for training, I can appreciate how some people might not want to leave their personal data around for some company to use without their permission.
This is just a speculation on my part, as I have no data to back that assertion up. So, grain of salt and all.
That’s actually a moot point on Lemmy as it only guarantees regular users lose convenient access. And there is ZERO presumption of privacy everywhere on the fediverse. The system is not designed for that, even when it comes to deleted posts.
I get that. I also wonder how many Lemmy users get that?
Depending on the question,people do not want people they personally know to identify them.
Shouldn’t be asking on the fediverse at all, even if you delete a post there is zero presumption of privacy on the fediverse. It’s not at all designed for that.
I don’t disagree. But some people see it that way.
