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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Hadn’t noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Forums have been dealing with this for decades. XKCD even made a comic about forum posts going stale.
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
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”
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 It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn’t a strong historical context that can be referenced.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.
I think a good solution would be to create a community specifically to connect people who don’t want to share their posts with 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
I did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled “solved”… then deleted for some reason. 😞
DenverCoder9 strikes again?
Protip, if you think about what you post before you post it, you don’t have to scrub the record after the fact. :D
Removed by mod
Sometimes I assume the mods delete them because no one answered
Why does this need a post? Just don’t respond?
Because I have no idea if the questioner is going to do that beforehand
You never will!
So the answer to your question is: to discourage that behaviour.
Yes.
How the fuck are you supposed to know the person you’re answering will or won’t delete the post after?
You won’t.
So… Just let the community die? That’s your suggestion? 😑
It’s a “float to the top” scenario. We can’t assume some one person will arbitrate.
I found this an interesting point worth thinking about. And I kinda agree, why delete good information.
oh shit son, you running this show too? Nice work trying to keep people in line and keeping the knowledge around, and again, great work on your light touch moderation on YSK, you’re doing great.
What
