This community isn't your personal adviser
from roofuskit@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 18:08
https://lemmy.world/post/47758551
from roofuskit@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 18:08
https://lemmy.world/post/47758551
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.
threaded - newest
I did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled “solved”… then deleted for some reason. 😞
DenverCoder9 strikes again?
Was it this one?
Mod Removed Post Extending A LUKS Encrypted HDD To Utilize All Of The Drive (500 GB) [SOLVED] reason: Rule 3
Oh yes that was it!
So, mod removed. I feel less annoyed. 😄
Has that been happening a lot here?
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.
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.
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.
That seems like a client-side UI issue though. I’m sure you could get that request into the dev roadmap of your preferred client.
Unfortunately it seems most major Lemmy clients (join-lemmy.org/apps) are small or individual projects, some of which are closed source or use their public repos just for transparency. Seems like a relatively easy feature to build though if the APIs still spit out all the required data after deletion.
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.
Good point. If a post is two minutes old with no replies, may as will let folks change clean up their misclicks.
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?
Requesting mod action would probably work.
Unless there is no active mod.
maybe just edit it to omit those info? (we don’t preserve edit history right?)
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.
Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “deleted”.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
I see you’ve opted to just redefine somebody’s requirements rather than solve their problem.
Honestly, it’s my favorite argument tactic.
if you don’t want replies, just don’t post. everyone will be better off than if you are deleting posts. actually it’s the easiest thing to do.
that being said. are you guilty of deleting your posts after they had discussions? because if so, I’ll just block you because you are taking away value from the community, not adding to it
Somebody may want an answer and once they get it don’t want the other replies to keep notifying them.
No I don’t do this. But it’s remarkable that all the lemmykins arguing with me and down-voting me simply can’t see things from another person’s pov.
Do something once? Ew.
Do something infinitely? 🥵💦
sounds logical, the biggest logical, even
Ive never heard anything more logical in my life, and I am a cold unthinking machine running on pure logic
Checkmate
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 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.
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.
Holy bad faith Batman.
Sure, that’s why Google made an exclusivity deal with wikipedia instead of reddit to train their ai for any organic user level reviews/discussions on anything.
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.
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 is maybe weird but folks should be allowed to delete stuff again. There is no rule against it either. Make it one if it is something that the broader community doesn’t like.
Edit: I don’t want to make new replies so I am just editing this in here. I did not say I am ok with people deleting their posts. I found it idiotic when this was done on reddit, and it isn’t much better here. But the option is there, so people will use it. Make it a rule it shouldn’t be done or move to a platform where it isn’t possible, what else do you think you can do about this?
It’s selfish. Dont post questions to a public forum if you don’t want them public. We’re a community, not a concierge service.
I am just sitting here laughing over the fact that this is the very reason people hated on reddit. When reddit wouldn’t allow people to remove their helpful posts when they left, and everyone was outraged. But since we are not reddit here, it is of course a wholly different thing.
Don’t worry, I see my opinion is unpopular, so this is the last I say on this.
They were spiting Reddit, trying to destroy it as a community on purpose. Reddit only tried to stop it because they stood to lose money; not becsuse they gave a fuck about the users. That’s why they were pissed.
I think the problem is not your opinion but the attitude.
On reddit if a post was deleted I could still interact with the thread, even if the content of the post itself was gone.
So it was a bit more elegant, imho, as it allows continued discussion and being able to link to the thread without it being completely nuked.
I also think that set expectations for how people expected it to work here, where the post contents and author would be nuked but the thread could still be accessed by hotlink.
Don’t make the post if you don’t want others to benefit from it.
PM a random person and bother them if you want to be selfish hoard the info for yourself. Don’t make a public post on a public messaging board if you don’t want that info to be public.
I think its not about being allowed or not. Its about thinking before deleting if the action helps you in anyway and not doing it maybe helps many others.
Anyone can delete their posts.
Problem is that if they ask questions, get resolutions and then nuke the post - resolution gets nuked too. That is how communities die. Firstly, no one will seek answers here because it is not here anymore. Secondly, users will spawn lots of posts with the same question since the answer got nuked, which will annoy prevalent users.
Wouldn’t it be more better if a question with an answer stays on the forum for everyone to see? Hasn’t it happened to you to find a post with an issue discussed that is similar to yours except there is no answer anymore since it got nuked and all it has is a post title?
I know I’ve seen
[removed]
^[deleted]^
too many times.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #337 for this comm, first seen 4th Jun 2026, 18:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
The bot must be upvoting itself because yet again it listed a bunch of random abbreviations that aren’t in the thread at all.
Someone claimed it’s not ai slop but a bot with GitHub code but that code doesn’t produce this result.
It is suspicious that the bot “found” cloudflare without it being mentioned…
Remind me in the morning, I’ll take it down for investigation.
Bad bot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
this really sucks. can’t they just lock comments or something
Sometimes I assume the mods delete them because no one answered
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
Why does this need a post? Just don’t respond?
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.
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.
I found this an interesting point worth thinking about. And I kinda agree, why delete good information.
Protip, if you think about what you post before you post it, you don’t have to scrub the record after the fact. :D
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?
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
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
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.
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.
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 xkcd.com/-1/
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 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.
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
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.
It’s always standard OPSEC to anonymize/obfuscate your infra details.
If they are really concerned about privacy, host a local LLM and query it. You’ll get a subservient AI which doesn’t argue with you about data permanence, and all your data stays inhouse. Stop participating in public forums.
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.
If you post something to a federated platform, it is literally never deleted. There is no privacy to be gained from deleting posts from the fediverse.
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.
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)
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.
I really don’t understand these people. If you don’t want to be doxxed or scraped, stop participating online. It’s that simple. Even if you participate in a private sub, it will eventually get scrapped.
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”
Is it people deleting specific posts, or people deleting their accounts? I do find it kind of weird that when you delete your account, it deletes all the data you contributed. Maybe it’s the right choice though, IDK.
Holy stackoverflow effect batman!
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
lemmy.world/modlog/116
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.
Exactly, I could understand it on the huge subreddits with one question per minute, but here is so silent…
Plus, as a user, when a mod deletes a post that I took over ten minutes to write, I go “fuck It” and stop contributing altogether (this also includes replying to other posts)
Some people think that keeping a community laser focused attracts more readers through quality. It’s an ideal that I respect, but I’ve never really observed that to be true in reality.
If you’re reading this @HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz consider this my polite feedback that I completely get what you’re trying to accomplish but you might be working harder than you need to be.
@HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world Just to add, I would say working to the detriment of the community through the deletions.
Locking would make more sense, along with redirecting to specific communities that you feel would be more relevant.
As I see it, I think people post here for what could be considered tangential because it is more popular than similar communities. I think this very post shows that the users have been perfectly fine with the posts being made, and are bothered by the information (effectively) disappearing with deletions.
If the mod team does not want those sort of posts here, of course thats fine. But it is kind of shitty to delete them, especially with so much interaction already there. I’d encourage locking them and redirecting through a mod comment instead. If you can’t think of a more appropriate community for them, its likely they can’t either, which is why they posted here in the first place.
Just my 2¢.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Considering your application of the rules, I really dont think thats what you want. Unless you want me to go ahead and restore posts that (like other users per this thread) seem relevant enough to be here.
Quite a response to “here’s a way this could work better for everyone”, too.
But if its what you want, sure, I’ll do it.
Edit: to be clear, I’d like you to confirm this is really what you want.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
Mod had deleted my posts that I feel were relevant as not relevant.
It’s a major pet peeve of mind when places get overly zealous about moderating what is on or off topic when the volume of posts doesn’t warrant it. Especially when there has already been some discussion on the posts.
<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/d1809832-12f5-414e-86bd-d57516f3c6d8.png">
Had that same thing happen to me recently too
lemmy.world/post/39025760
wtf? Half the post is nuked even after being locked. I don’t even see how such a small community can be so stuck up about relevancy and purity washing selfhosted as if we all own our own DNS registrars and can do outbound SMTP.
I don’t get it why would selfhosting-related hardware questions be irrelevant? If we are talking about 14tb drives having weird behaviour, I’d say this is the right place to ask.
Just glanced at it, but noticed a user (ayyy) was temp banned here 24 days ago for apparently telling a user to kys, then appointed mod here 45 minutes ago.
Wat?
Keep scrolling
lemmy.world/comment/24104894
Everyone gets a mod badge
Looked like admins did it so could have been anywhere.
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?
I believe forking doesn’t work because of network effects - Wikipedia.
It absolutely is!
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 wasnt suggesting it would be easy, in fact i think it would be rather difficult on both fronts.
My comment was more about the method by which this kind of this was intended to be addressed.
Does deleting the root post nuke the whole thread?
I dont think so. So quoting the original post would be an effective solution.
The post yes, the comments no. You can’t view the post any more. Here’s one that was removed by the mod, but the effect is the same: lemmy.zip/post/65524914
Comments on a post still exist in that user’s history, and you can see those, but you can’t see them in context.
Maybe it should, or maybe moderators can clean up the community by removing it ? (Don’t know if it’s even possible)
Quote ppl you answer.
indeed
that will help somewhat in the future when lemmy gets its shit together, but since I came to lemmy deleted posts cannot be loaded at all, even though the server still has the comments
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
True
It sticks around in other software just FYI. Maybe lemmy should have something that admins can do? Maybe something super admins can re-instate if a mod states should be un-deleted? I dunno.
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.
Who’s downvoting this?? Ban those moronic leeches. They’re either anti-community or have the reading comprehension of a potato, ffs.
I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
Because the moderators will ban them if they don’t.
Can you expand on this? Why do you think this?
I don’t get it either, but it was also a big problem on Reddit for years.
On Reddit especially, it usually was people asking a question, then having their alt account respond with whatever they were trying to shill, and just doing that over and over again.
It’s just another type of advertising to them. Ask a question trying to solve a problem, then use your alt account to shill your own solution.
Doesn’t work that way on lemmy: if they delete the post, then the alt’s shilling disappears, too.
I think it’s more so that they can post the same thing frequently, hoping that it gets burned into peoples’ brains.
Frankly, I don’t think users should have that power.
I’m not against it, post something it the wrong place, or during a bender. Would be kinda cool if lemmy tracked user starts on deletes like it does on posts and comments
I’m still undecided about their own text (deleting comments or post text disrupts the conversation but there’s valid reasons), but I don’t think the OP of a thread should have any control over the existence of that full comment thread.
Maybe some form of engagement or time limit would serve. If the post is empty or low engagement and less than 2 days old, it can go. After that it’s up to mod?
Or just do it like reddit did, where you can delete your post content and remove your username from it, but the thread and comments remain.
Though with how the fediverse works, it’s possible to spin up a custom instance that highlights deleted content instead of deleting it, meaning the attempt to get rid of it can be what brings it more attention if anyone has decided to do it. Just like with vote identities, they aren’t anonymous and there are instances/sites that just show who voted for what.
Op pls delete this post
mods please. it is giving me gas.
I just want to apologize for being the person who asks questions and then doesn’t respond to the comments. I get overwhelmed D: but I’d never delete my post, what’s the purpose in that?
Someone may have the same question in the future and there will be answers. You not responding is not that bad but it is even better that you do and provide an update to your situation, if you wish.
Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.
or at least change the title to [solved] with a link to the comment that worked.
With 8.4 billion people on this planet, I can’t be the only one asking the question.
and if everyone who asks that question has that mindset then we end up with no answers longterm.
its annoying to scroll through 15 threads asking the same thing looking for an answer, but its infinitely worse to find no threads related to what you’re trying to do.
xkcd.com/979/
How is building a collective knowledge base possible without gathering the advice of others here?
How can you build a collective knowledge base when you delete your post after receiving an answer?
I seriously don't understand why people do that, either. No one knows/cares who you are and there is no reason to feel ashamed for not knowing how something works.
tbh, I care to know those who are deleting their posts
I will say I am making the assumption that these are actual people and not bot accounts.
Even if they were bots, why even bother removing the posts?
It's not like it is somehow detrimental to what they are doing.
Take a look at the r/jellyfin subreddit which consists of 95% questions on how to access jellyfin remotely.
I think Op wants to avoid that
How does one access jellyfin remotely?
VPN
Port Forward
Reverse Proxy
VPN adjacent software
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #0 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Bruh
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
Yeah it’s more than likely the same people doing it all the time.
Edit: either that or AI bots farming information from Lemmy to feed their databases.
I deleted my post here specifically. it was completely useless to anyone else and 0 chance anyone could find any part of it useful.
I’ve done that a coupla times when I determine that the post itself and the replies provide no value to anyone whatsoever.
I wouldn’t think of removing a post otherwise, if I made an error in OP or came off stupid or sumsuch, I’d edit it for posterity; even when it’s a pile-on downvote bonanza, I wouldn’t think of touching it.
How do you know it was completely useless to anyone else though?
completely useless, 101%, the resolution had dick to do with the subject (so anyone arriving there through search woulda wasted their time) and it had zero to do with the community’s focus, selfhosting.
except maybe to poison LLM output, that could be of use.
So if it resolved it how did it have nothing to do with the subject.
You used “I” a lot in that response! You seem to think you have the best idea of what everybody else would find valuable.
What is actually true is stupid, pointless, simple and obvious questions being posted and responded to means other people don’t need to post the same question again.
you can rest assured I know the difference; it was completely useless, I didn’t go “problem solved, let’s nuke the fucker”. I had posts that received a barrage of downvotes and I let 'em be. had posts where the conclusion differed from what was originally intended and I’d let them be as there was value in the resolution. this was none of them things, no chance anyone would find this useful.
So you found it useful but no one else well. Ok.
If you ever get to the point of needing to ask for direction online, always assume it will help someone else, even if it is only 1 other person 10 years later.
It’s just the right thing to do, otherwise it feels like you just want to serve yourself and deleting your post afterwards is kinda saying “only I deserve this information.”
From my own experience, there have been many times where a post somewhere online with barely any interaction has helped me. If that post was deleted before I got a chance to see it then there’s two paths I see:
The more answers to dumb questions online, the better.
Oh, I thought this was about me since I just asked for file transfer stuff but you’re specifically talking about deleting it right after. It happened to me on asklemmy where the user deleted it right after
Asking questions in a public forum (after searching imo) is generally a positive thing. Answers are then public and the next person with the question can find the answer. That sort of behaviour should be encouraged, and no one will ever complain about it imo.
@roofuskit
https://xkcd.com/979/
It’d be helpful to put some links to known good resources for common questions in the e.g. about page.
Also are you suggesting we don’t ask or don’t ask and then delete?
I believe it’s don’t ask then delete.
Just go ask an LLM first (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Mistral/yourselfhostedllm). If it doesn’t know, then come ask here.
it never does. never had, never will.
Criticise llm all you want but it’s successfully walked me through some really technical things that I had no idea how to do.
The funny thing Is someone answering the question is probably using a llm.
Please don’t encourage use of misinformation tools
People do that? That’s fucked up…
What the hell is the purpose?
Wondering the same thing, maybe they think the information about their private server and network setups will be used against them?
I think some people are being a bit of privacy freaks, so they don’t want to leave their data online. I still think its stupid tho cuz Ive posted questions, get a good response but forget after a while. Then when I do go back to remind myself, its deleted.
Ol6oi
On reddit they had bots that would automatically repost the content of the post so it couldn’t be deleted.
This is the same thing as posting on a forum a question, then saying never mind I figured it out WITHOUT STATING THE ANSWER! When googling shit and coming across this back in the day I would get more mad at those than my issue.
I haven’t seen the posts (probably from deletion) but Lemmy to me is an invaluable source of smart Linux and selfhosters. Seems like a great place to ask questions for problem to me on the surface. Where should people like me go to if I need help? Genuinely asking