Submitted 2 weeks ago by roofuskit@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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.
I’ve made a couple of posts here and there to get some answers on how to do certain things, as I’m really new to this whole self-hosting thing. But after some time my thread gets auto-deleted, often before I can even get a solid answer to my question.
So, if /c/SelfHosted isn’t where I should post beginner questions for the community to help me, where should I post? The sidebar provides no link to something like that.
I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
They didn’t
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?
axolotl_cpp@feddit.it@feddit.it 2 weeks ago Companies already do it with Reddit, so it’s not surprising, their error is to think that the niche open source federated alternative to reddit would make their bs work
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.
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.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
No, they don’t.
What the hell is the purpose?
They’re not doing this
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago 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?
Okay I’m just gonna call somebody out - Imperious_melange just deleted a thread with over 200 upvotes where a thriving discussion was underway. It was about whether people perceived a pro-China and anti-west sentiment on Lemmy. I tried to post a reply and the site said “deleted by creator”. The thread was just gone. Whoever you are, Imperious_melange, I’m callin’ you out for this dick move. Please cut out that crap.
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
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.
laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago On reddit they had bots that would automatically repost the content of the post so it couldn’t be deleted.
Artisian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago I mean; the mechanics ensure that it kinda is. Are these good mechanics?
This is a major ‘upside’ to centrally controlled spaces, they are tricky to exploit in several ways. I don’t think that maintaining a open community with both:
titanicx@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago As much as I hate to say itOP,v but when somebody ask a question they are asking for their own personal needs. And community is like this are actually here to serve an individuals questions. If that’s not the point of why you’re here then maybe what you should do is start a new thread world whatever it’s called here that’s called spell posted library or something like that so that way you can create a community fact sheet about how to do things. Why somebody delete stuff who knows people are weirdly private about openly public things. Maybe people feel embarrassed about asking your question or move it. It’s who the hell knows. But in the end it is their threat to ask questions and if you choose not to answer a question and then you don’t have to. However your time that you took to answer their question did not get wasted as they chose to take that advice and run with it. Just because your question now has to be read explain or your answer has to be reacclaimed in another thread doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have to be explained in another thread anyways. You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago Ol6oi
NostraDavid@programming.dev 2 weeks ago Just go ask an LLM first (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Mistral/yourselfhostedllm). If it doesn’t know, then come ask here.
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?
argent@dook.business 2 weeks ago 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
It was a mod
yuman@programming.dev 2 weeks ago 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.
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.
None of that happened
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CSAM | Child Sexual Abuse Material |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
[Thread #0 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
How is building a collective knowledge base possible without gathering the advice of others here?
Op pls delete this post
I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
Who’s downvoting this?? Ban those moronic leeches. They’re either anti-community or have the reading comprehension of a potato, ffs.
I suspect people who realized it was the former moderator removing the posts, and not the users themselves.
We don’t need to be unpleasant to disagreethough, so going forward lets try to avoid that.
Eh… IMO there’s a big difference between disagreeing about something reasonable, and disagreeing about the most basic tenets of what makes a community a community.
Kinda’ just making room for the sort of hypocritical ilk that ruin so many things. I can think of so many political and religious examples these days but I’ll refrain from fully describing such depressing things.
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.
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.
Quote ppl you answer.
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?
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
mlg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago 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 assume they did not read the post very clearly.
Holy stackoverflow effect batman!
DundasStation@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Well OP. Looks like your post resulted in a moderator resigning and the appointment of two new moderators in this community. As I’ve said previously, it was a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3, and not users deleting them after getting the answer.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
curbstickle_lw@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And I’ll use your comment as my post here for a local mod appointment of my lw account!
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hey, you made it!