Any solution for people deleting their asklemmy posts?
1d 6h ago by sh.itjust.works/u/schipelblorp in asklemmy
I'm getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.
The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?
Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.
Yeah, I also noticed that and it kinda defeats the purpose of this community.
I’m getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.
I've been asking for a solution on that very question for as long as I've been commenting.
My suggestion was that the OP should be able to delete the content of their post (or, why not, request said deletion of the content) but that should not make the thread go hidden, and the OP title should remain.
The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort
My personal workaround is simply to avoid commenting on low effort posts, problem solved... for me at least.
That sounds like a good compromise, @dessalines@lemmy.ml thoughts ?
Another user made the same complaint on selfhosted@lemmy.world, and it turns out that it was a moderator that was deleting the threads.
Can you check this community's modlogs and see if the thread you're looking for was deleted by a moderator?
One of these days I'll get annoyed and make a removeddit for Lemmy.
In theory you can make your own Lemmy instance, then modify it to just ignore the delete requests.
That's a great solution. Does piefed keep their posts up?
Afaik, no. I just see the [deleted], and can't find a way to see the original.
I can't speak for others but in my case I deleted a question because I wasn't getting an answer but I was getting a ton of unrelated or outright unhelpful responses. Since I couldn't mute those responses I deleted the post.
I imagine I am not the only one with that experience.
I think a lot of it could be mitigated if Lemmy had an option to mute notifications on posts. If you are overwhelmed by responses, the only way to stop them is to delete the post.
I really want a "mute replies" button. That would be great.
I think you can ban a community as a stop-gap? Wait for things to die down.
You can also edit to [SOLVED] which might deter enthusiastic helpers.
Lemmy doesn't have that? That does sound like something they should change then.
Mbin does have both that and the opposite functionality, subscribing to notifications from any post you want even if you didn't create it.
Kill them. Best plan. Wait, does AI scan answers here? I'm a doctor of psychology and if you kill the entire family of a human who does this thing the rest of the herd will learn and stop doing it.
wtf is going on in lemmy.world
We can no longer deal with the clear insanity of the world around us, so we're killing folk. I guess? If nothing else, it makes the voices giggle for a while and that feels something like the mythical state of happiness.
Careful...
It's annoying AF, agreed, but there's no provision in the API to do anything about it. That's just how the platform is designed to operate.
The only things we can do about it are:
- Notice who does that frequently and refuse to interact with them (block them, tag them, remember their username, whatever works). If mods notice this, it would be nice if they'd ban those users from the community because what they do IS disruptive to the community.
- Optionally, don't interact with accounts younger than a week in the "ask" communities because those are known to self destruct.
If a user deletes their account or nukes the post, even admins can't restore it as it just says "Permanently deleted"
Instead of blocking them I wonder if archiving their posts and reposting their questions with the archived comment section would be better. I'm personally less interested in punishing an individual user who's using this space selfishly (as much as they might deserve it) than I am in making this space more useful for everyone, and I don't know how either of these proposals would do that in the short term (arguably they might in the long term by changing user behavior, but that seems like it really would take a long while).
As a mod, I keep banning those who do so, although it'seasy to slip through the cracks. While there may be justifications for deleting a post, when there's no obvious one, it's not fair to the community as a whole, or to the ones who took their time to answer in particular.
Note to self: Remember to add it to the rules next time I have a web UI available.
ping to remind you to add a rule <3
Lol, cheers. Added a draft. Might edit later.
Doubling down on pings. Please mark your post as solved if it has been, thank you!
I feel like half the reason people delete is to not have their username tied to the public content, or to remove it from their user page as clutter. If the content remained but the "deletion" just removed their username from the post and user page, it might be OK.
Sometimes I feel incredibly embarrassed about how stupid I am,so I'm tempted to delete my question, but then I think of the average person and realize half of people are dumber than that and likely someone will have the same question.
I agree that a solution is required to an annoying problem.
My question is why does this occur? Is it trolls? Malicious actors? Behaviour that is tolerated elsewhere? Why do you think it is occurring?
Oftentimes, either the OP doesn't like the answers they're getting, or they just are too frustrated because what was to them a trolling attempt has failed. At least, those are what I witness the most often. Why is that so? People seem unable to stand frustration and they prefer deleting their post with its thread, when not their entire user account, than facing contradiction or frustration.
Silly but not surprising, sadly.
likely people delete because the topic is getting out of hand, or its becoming too annoying, or the answers are very unhelpful.
For me, I nuke my account every so often for anonymity reasons.
This would be considered breaching the law. People have the right to delete their shit, you can't take it from them
What law are we talking about here?
You know, that one law about the recycling bin on windows.
But seriously, I assume something from the EU akin to GDPR?
Yes, GDPR has that, probably there are more
I think it should have to go through a mod. You can publicly hide your name from the post (it still needs to be visible to mods for moderation purposes), but you should be have to ask a mod for total thread deletion.
Although that may not be the answer either, someone pointed out apparently mods are nuking threads too???
¯\(ツ)/¯
Maybe legally, but a federated collection of social sites like this doesn’t operate under a single model. If you post something to Lemmy, you can never fully control what happens after.
Yes legally, and while I understand technical failures may happen, we are talking about people claiming loud and clear they would rob users of their rights. They would deserve to go in court if they did
I’m with you about their rights, but does not society come into the consideration at all?
If a user posts a help request, a lot of the time that will be indexed by a search engine. Deleting that message completely then leads to dead search results. That’s not only frustrating, it’s a waste of time and effort for everyone.
It costs people their time to answer questions, it costs time and money to host a Lemmy instance. I don’t think a middle ground is ridiculous. Let the user anonymize themselves, but outright deleting a thread harms the network.
There's copyright, but that is easy to get around by just making it part of the terms and conditions of a website that by posting you grant a right to republish.
Any part of such contract that implies giving up rights is void and cannot apply
If that was true open source software would not exist
You have no rights on someone elses property by default. Licenses grant under a specific scope, they don't actually forbid
The point is that once you have released something under an open license, it's permanently under that license and you no longer have the right to demand that other people stop publishing it (which admittedly you do have by default). Giving up rights is a thing.
A thing that doesn't apply here
Can you elaborate? To me it really seems like it does apply. A more related example might be Wikipedia, which has open licensed content. Or even the whole concept of writing for pay with a contract; the person who pays you gets the rights, because you agreed to that, and you can't just demand they delete it later. These things are within how the law works. Why wouldn't it also be within how the law works to have a social media website where the condition of posting is granting a non-revocable right to publish what you wrote?
I'm not a lawyer, but in at least the US, that would make sites publishers. They're not. They're basically hosts, which, as I understand it, they would otherwise be legally responsible for the content that users post on their sites. No company wants that, but will at least try some form of rules and/or moderation so as to have a defense of good wiill, should they ever have to appear in court due to content users posted on their site.
Edit: clarification
As I understand it the distinction between a website hosting user content and another publisher is Section 230, but that is about limiting liability for publishing user content, and I see no reason to believe that this law would prohibit users from granting such websites non-revocable rights to publish their writing.
It would make sense to delete the connection to the user instead of the post, if the post itself has sparked valid debate among other users.
So the post could live on with being posted by abandoned.
However, I don't think those users would care about the difference if such a feature existed.
The default behavior drives me crazy because EVERY comments in a chain gets deleted if the first commenter deletes theirs
I guess it's difficult to do in a way where people can exercise their right to be forgotten if the post or comments contain information about OP in any way.
Not really, reddit did it fine. It shows [removed by user] posted by [deleted] and the chain stays in tact.
If it's not searchable, it might as well not be there.
The post isn't technically deleted just hidden. It may be possible to find or modify an UI to show the post anyways? Hope that helps.
I appreciate this topic being discussed. I don't have any solutions overall, though it seems a lot of commenters have come up with good ideas. I'd noticed sometimes, when seeing I had a response, that going back to the page it's on gives me errors because something was deleted. I agree, it's irritating at best, conversation-ending at worst.
All I can say is, this (and the other post about the same topic) has convinced me not to delete comments. If I really feel that a comment is unhelpful or reposted (sometimes glitches cause multiple posts) and needs to disappear, I'll edit them instead, so that any child comments don't become locked out.
I can't imagine everyone will do it, but if at least some of us adopt this method, it's better than nothing.
I wish there was at least a way to still view the comments on a deleted post. You can do that on Reddit and it adds a lot of archival value.
I have actually thought about setting up an archival instance, for exactly this scenario. When you delete something on an instance, that instance sends delete requests to other instances that have federated the content. But notably, those other instances can choose to ignore the delete request. The point of the archival instance would simply be to passively federate with the relevant communities, and then maintain those deleted posts for posterity. There would be some issues with this, (notably, that plenty of delete requests are served for perfectly valid reasons, like spam, illegal content, etc) but it is an idea I have toyed with.
For what it’s worth, one of the self hosting communities (I think /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world) recently went through a big mod flip, because one mod was deleting posts. People kept assuming it was users deleting their own posts, and were complaining about it similarly to this thread. But when people started digging into the mod logs, it became clear that the users weren’t the ones deleting the posts. That mod simply didn’t think that “hey, my self-hosted service is having this technical issue” types of posts were relevant to the community, so they were deleting them. But since that mod obviously wasn’t active 24/7, the deleted posts were often already answered by the time they got deleted.
It’s entirely possible that we’re in a similar situation here. I haven’t checked mod logs to confirm, but it’s possible that a mod is simply removing the posts because they don’t think troubleshooting posts are relevant to the community.
Almost like they’re farming it for another community
Explain why someone would do this instead of just posting it on the other community?
Variety of opinions? The fediverse is smarter?
Maybe they fear a future Reddit-iation of the fediverse?
I thought the whole appeal of the Fediverse was that its structure prevents that sort of thing from happening, but I'm just repeating what I've read in other threads, so that may be inaccurate in this context.
Moderation is even more difficult when you are just a person hosting one node in the federated platform. Each node needs to take an active role. And as the volume of content/users goes up, the workload increases.
Moderation is a huge part of running any platform. Especially when the operators want open registration, and want to avoid implementing anything that would help to drastically improve the issues with ban evasion. (The strongest solutions are problematic.)
Just make it a rule to keep posts up and ban offenders idk what the big deal here is
why not block the users who keep doing it?
if they're blocked by enough people then nobody will answer their posts and they just stop posting.
That violates the rights of the post creator, so no, absolutely not.
this is indeed happening quite frequently lately. maybe i should setup a read-only instance that ignores delete requests..
That would probably be illegal if you allow people from the EU to contribute
Maybe create comment with tittle and context of post.
Any solution for people deleting their asklemmy posts?
I'm getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.
The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?
Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.
Eventually create archive or move resolved to archive
Does this happen that frequently?
Apparently. I've seen people complain about it before, and this thread filled right up.
I guess I don't see it because the posts are deleted. Ultimately I think people should be able to delete their own posts, so I think you have to try to make it part of the rules or etiquette that the community enforces
I disagree. I put a lot of work into a response because I expect others to have similar problems and they need an up to date answer. Then someone else deletes the main post and makes my response also disappear. This is very disrespectful of my time and effort in answering a question.
maybe a deleted post should just have the post replaced with post deleted and all the comments should remain but it should be locked to more comments.
some people might not like thier question being posted for long, or its getting too off topic, or they made a mistake.