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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Just go ask an LLM first (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Mistral/yourselfhostedllm). If it doesn’t know, then come ask here.
Please don’t encourage use of misinformation tools
it never does. never had, never will.
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.
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
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
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.
Op pls delete this post
I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
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 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.
Because the moderators will ban them if they don’t.
Can you expand on this? Why do you think this?
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.
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.
completely useless to anyone else
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:
- I never understood a problem and had to give up, or:
- I found a newer post that someone made on the exact same problem where they or someone else spends another X amount of time trying to solve it.
The more answers to dumb questions online, the better.
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.
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
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #0 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Bruh
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
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?
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
https://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.
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.
Had that same thing happen to me recently too
Mod had deleted my posts that I feel were relevant as not relevant.
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
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.
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.
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)
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.
Quote ppl you answer.
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
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
Quote ppl you answer.
indeed
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 recieving 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do something once? Ew.
Do something infinitely? 🥵💦
sounds logical, the biggest logical, even
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?
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
Why don’t you like getting replies? That’s the fun part!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
