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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I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
Because the moderators will ban them if they don’t.
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
that’s a lot of rule 3
Looks like it’s hybridsarcasims favorite rule
Wow crazy I couldn’t imagine that this community gets enough posts to warrant so aggressively enforcing rules about the content.
Yes! This drives me crazy. I will sometimes go back and edit posts to add more info months later.
We have all been in a situation where we are looking for a very specific answer, and the answer only exists in one obscure forum from a decade ago that has the exact info we are looking for.
It’s hard enough to ensure lemmy’s long-term fidelity without people axing their own content.
Quote ppl you answer.
Quote ppl you answer.
indeed
Hadn’t noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
“fuck you got mine”
There are a couple of accounts who were doing this regularly for some reason on all sorts of different topics. But I would need to see more evidence of this happening. As someone else mentioned it could be mods or a couple rare cases or all sorts of things.
I wonder if someone is trying out an AI or something and seeing the results. Then deleting. More evidence will pop up eventually.
My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later. In reality, if someone was truly concerned about avoiding doxxing, they’d just switch accounts. Because anyone can spin up a single-user instance, federate to scrape content from all the communities they want, and then simply refuse to respect delete requests.
Because when you delete something on a Lemmy instance, the instance simply sends a delete request to all the other instances that federated with it. But those other instances can easily ignore the delete request and retain the deleted content for as long as they want.
That’s also part of why it’s so stupid that AI crawlers are scraping Lemmy and thrashing instance owners’ rate limits. The AI crawler could just set up a new instance and automatically gather the content via federation. But instead, they just send crawler bots. Because fuck the instance owners, I got my content either way and using a crawler bot didn’t require me to learn how federation works.
Lately in all of the lemmys like each time I go to look at my replies (if I ever get one), the reply, my comment, and the thread are all gone. I’m often thinking it’s mods just nuking threads because of inflammation or whatever.
Weird, I see that pretty rarely and is usually because the post broke some rule (offtopic, duplicate, etc)
Holy stackoverflow effect batman!
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Forums have been dealing with this for decades. XKCD even made a comic about forum posts going stale.
Not really the same issue. The xkcd is about unsolved or incompletely resolved issues. This Herr is about questions vanishing along with the answers.
missed opportunity to post https://xkcd.com/-1/
I imagine this is a controversial opinion…but isn’t the idiomatic solution to this to either:
petition the mods to get this rule added and enforced
or
To start a community that enforces this rule and let it compete with this one.
Isn’t that the whole idea of federation?
petition the mods to get this rule added and enforced
I’m keen to know how that would be written much less enforced. # deletes and you’re out? That’s a lot to keep up with unless there were some automated way of doing that.
I believe forking doesn’t work because of network effects - Wikipedia.
It absolutely is!
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
Pretty sure lots of the “deleted” posts were actually removed by the mods. Rule 3 seems to be a popular justification for post removal in this community, and it basically outlaws all of the “my server is having this issue, anyone got any ideas” types of posts that OP has cited.
While I agree it’s popular for removing posts, maybe it shouldn’t be. If we want users to organically find Lemmy, one of the best ways to do that is the same way users end up at Reddit: By googling an error code, and finding a five year old “Edit: I figured it out. Here is what I did” post.
Or maybe we just need to make (and properly support) a community that is dedicated to those kinds of posts. If a “my server is broken plz help” post isn’t relevant to /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world, maybe we need to make a /c/SelfHostedSupport to redirect the Rule 3 posts to.
Yeah I think this is a tool worth having for mods. Maybe going through deleted posys and seeing who are repeat offenders.
To me, that isn’t building a community, that’s extracting from one. It’s no better than AI scraping. You got your answer and then keep it for yourself.
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.
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.
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?
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.
no. everything shpuld be petsisted, which is why i donate to the internet archive.
Even misinformation? CSAM?
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.
Uncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.
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?
Why don’t you like getting replies? That’s the fun part!
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 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.
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.
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 have mixed feelings on post deletion. On the one hand, historical technical forum conversations are an incredibly valuable resource, and /c/selfhosted is a technical community. The value comes from having a history in context, and deleting part of the context damages the whole and makes the whole corpus less useful overall. It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn’t a strong historical context that can be referenced.
On the other hand, people are right to be concerned about leaving large tracts of text available on the open internet, where it can be scraped, profiled, and possibly de-anonymized. I am very sympathetic to those who delete out of concerns for their own privacy, and I don’t know what a good solution is.
Maybe a compromise would be (on user “delete”) to leave the contents of a post intact, but simply delete the username from the post, and the post from the user’s history? Deletion on the fediverse is a bit of a sham anyway, and it would leave valuable discussions intact for other users.
If people want to ask something that they don’t want tied to them, they should use a throwaway account. Scrapers will probably grab the text quickly (especially if they’re using ActivityPub) so it’s a false sense of security to do it days later.
I think a good solution would be to create a community specifically to connect people who don’t want to share their posts and people willing to provide individual help. They could find each other and DM a conversation. Milking a public forum for advice and then vandalizing it by deleting the post is definitely NOT a good solution, and I do not share your sympathy for people who do that. It’s like curtaining off a few back rows of a bus to use all day as an office - although that could have been funny in a Seinfeld episode.
There are good reasons for hiding a paper trail. Specifically in a self-hosting community, I understand operators wanting to hide their particular technical details from those who would wish to target them. This can be government agencies who like to arrest or kill dissidents, or freelance assholes who just like to attack queer infra where they can. I don’t think deleting posts is particularly effective, and the privacy concerns would be better addressed with a safe alt or a burner account, but I get why some people do it. Privacy is hard and when the stakes are high, people tend to over-secure rather than risk under-securing.
That would be any freelancing hiring platform.
I spent many years as a software dev contractor working through agencies, but I still don’t see the parallel.
I mean if you want personal, private, ad-hoc support, hire someone to work for you personally.
And yet free opensource software exists. Lots of knowledgeable people are happy to help others during their free time.
It’s me, I’m people
I haven’t noticed many posts deleted by the user themselves. I see a lot of ‘deleted by user’ comments. I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact. That way, someone searching can cross-moginate whatever their issues are with what solved the issue for me. Maybe the user deleting the post once it was solved is embarrassed they asked a supposedly ‘stupid’ question?
I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact.
You (and folks who do the same) are unsung heroes. Thank you.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m a hero. It just seems a ‘thank you’ and a [SOLVED] would be a common courtesy, especially if someone took the time, and had the patience to muck through my feeble brain to tweeze out exactly what the issue was. LOL
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.
Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “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.
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.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
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?
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.
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.
Have you checked the modlogs to see if the posts you’re talking about were deleted by the mods? The mods here seem to really not want this community to be a support community and will delete it under Rule 3.
This is more likely the answer. I’ve seen multiple popular posts get deleted from here. I wish Lemmy did the soft delete method instead so that history is kept.
Realistically, a platform where you can delete your own questions so that they disappear for everyone isn’t the best platform for technical support communities. But a platform where you can’t delete your own posts is not the best platform for for a lot of other things, like privacy.
Two use cases without overlap seems like a good argument that there should be two different platforms.
Fediverse is not private in any sense. Anything you post (or up/downvote) is blasted out to every federated instance and only gets deleted if that instance respects the delete command, which you cant rely on.
Too many people are ignorant of this.
I have a belief (not based in law, just my personal feeling) that once you post something in a conversation in a public forum, you no longer have any natural right to control it. By posting it in a conversation on the public internet, you have, in a practical sense, waved any right to control it. That is a part of a conversation that belongs to the public, and you gave your comment away freely. It is public record. You cannot demand that it be forgotten or erased any more than I can demand that something I said to my friends yesterday be forgotten and erased.
If I hosted a forum, I would make it clear that this is the policy, and I would not allow people to delete comments that they posted. Edits would be allowed, but the history would be available. Deletions would only ever happen if I was legally compelled.
This all gets complicated if someone posts private information about a third party. I would rapidly delete such posts and ban such users. The third party never consented to anything, so it’s not the same.
Fully agree. I wish people hadn’t started using their real names on the internet, it’s made privacy so much more of a concern than it had any reason to be in the age of @GoombaStomp69.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
Not seen that on Lemmy, but it’s definitely been a problem on reddit for years. Agree with you - the questions and answers (and even the wrong answers) are valuable to anyone else searching for the same issue. “I got my answer, now fuck y’all”
