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.
Occasionally I’ll leave a flippant reply, realize i was being kind of an ass, then delete it because I’ve realized leaving it up may be doing more harm than good in some way. That’s what downvotes are for IMO - it’s like the immune system of Lemmy, pruning off the unwanted shit.
I believe, though, that this post is about the phenomenon of people making a post (not just a comment), then the post accumulates hundreds of votes & comments and the creator of that post hits delete for whatever reason. Which sucks because that wipes the post as well as the comments.
This is something that needs to be fixed IMO. One theory is it’s done to collect training data, psychological or market research - something along those lines. This is one of those rare places on the web where authentic human responses from a diverse cross-section of people can be harvested. If deletion wipes out all of it, those responses are captured and gone from the internet before too many competing bots and indexers can get to them.
More likely because they get a bunch of hostile replies and downvotes and say “fuck it”. They don’t want to see it piled up in their notifications.