cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/54923731

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.

    • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      351·
      21 days ago

      Sometimes down votes are a sign that you’re saying things people don’t want to hear or the right things but on a crazy instance, but sometimes down votes are a chance for self reflection where you have to ask yourself “Am I the asshole?” and in the latter case yeah I’m probably just going to delete it. No apologies though, I’m not looking to be a saint here.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      221·
      21 days ago

      I will say in their defense that some people delete their comments/posts not because they care about “karma” but because they now feel they were wrong and are genuinely embarrassed or think that its continued presence is just an annoyance to other people.

      That said, imo, unless you realize you’ve broken a rule in posting it or literally just posted by accident, it’s healthier for yourself and the community to simply e.g. edit in a correction and a “mea culpa”, even if you continue to get dogpiled for it.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        21 days ago

        I have, in the several years I’ve been here, deleted only a handful of comments - pretty much exclusively as a result of me being in a terrible mood and/or too drunk and commenting something very stupid or dickish, then reading it the next morning and going “what the fuck was I doing 🤦‍♂️”. That is thankfully vanishingly rare for me lol

    • brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      21 days ago

      I’ve had discussions here with people that don’t want down votes, like in YouTube. There are instances that have them disabled.

    • Summzashi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      310·
      21 days ago

      All around you.

      I want to prove I’m not a baby so please downvote this comment.

      Edit: please stop you’re hurting my feelings

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        Me too, go ahead - it doesn’t matter.

        What matters is when people scan your post history and check why you were downvoted, given the context of the comment. The community here is smaller, so if you post consistently, you can actually build a meaningful organic reputation (that is: other user’s opinions of you). Karma doesn’t matter. What you post, and how you engage with other users does.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    21 days ago

    What if we aren’t coming from Reddit? I had good karma way before the internet ever existed because I tried my best to treat the world around me with love and respect. Now that I’m older and knee-deep in the world’s tech I find I’ve become a bit irascible. Maybe that’s more a product of age than social engineering. I hope so.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    21 days ago

    I was on reddit for 10 years and have been on lemmy for 3. I’m still not sure what this is really supposed to mean.

    There is absolutely a “lifetime” karma score available for users, its just not centered in peoples bios like it is on lemmy. But it absolutely exists…

    And if people want to go for high scores more power to them. Get that dopamine where you can queen.

    • chortle_tortle@mander.xyzEnglish
      5·
      21 days ago

      I think their point is that on reddit, life time karma impacts the comment placement order; showing more comments from higher karma accounts. So I guess weirdos would delete comments that started to get negative votes on reddit so they weren’t seen as undesirable by the algorithm.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      21 days ago

      Elaborate pls. I know Piefed tracks the user’s votes under Attitude, but I’m not aware of tracking of other people’s votes on users posts and comments. Am I missing something?

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    93·
    21 days ago

    Devastating? Jeez.

    If you want to make a code change proposal, go ahead and make one. Otherwise, deletion is a feature offered to Lemmy users to use as they see fit. In fact some earlier (unrelated) proposals to speed up the software were rejected on the grounds that deletion is required to actually scrub the entry from the database, rather than simply making it inaccessible through the web. The scrubbing requirement may have been abandoned by now though.

    I half remember a Lemmy client (Voyager Jerboa?) with a user setting to automatically delete any post or comment that the user makes after 7 days or something. It had nothing to do with karma. I didn’t use that setting but it seemed reasonable to me. Lemmy is a discussion forum not a long term archive.

    I do like the idea of adding a wiki feature to Lemmy, to hold info of long term value to a community. Reddit already has something like that.**

    • Grimy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      21 days ago

      The comments under the post is content that other users contribute to. It’s very frustrating to be having what amounts to a conversation in the comments just for OP to thrash the whole thing. There’s also the problem that a lot of deleted posts are bots probably building a “unique” dataset to sell after (just a hypothesis).

      No reason why we can’t just have the body and the username removed from the post while keeping the comment section imo.

      • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        21 days ago

        Yes I see what you’re getting at. IDK how a software change proposal would be received. It could be that the devs think that the other comments on the thread could somehow identify the original poster or the topic. On at least one reddit subgroup there’s a bot that does that on purpose (copies the original post and maybe the author name into a thread comment). The reasons for the bot might be specific to the subreddit.

  • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    21 days ago

    Internet points aren’t the only reason people delete their posts/comments, though?

    I think people should think seriously about deleting posts, but comments that don’t contribute to the discussion for whatever reason definitely have a shelf life.

    And that’s aside from the old “a comment you made 10 years ago in another life gets you fired/cancelled” issues due to times changing, some shitlord quoting you out of context, etc, etc.

  • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    21 days ago

    I figured it was just instances culling old posts without a lot of engagement. I’ve had posts or comments that I’ve made get deleted and I didn’t request them