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.
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 (
VoyagerJerboa?) 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.**