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.
Are people deleting because of karma?
At least from my time on Reddit, when people deleted something, it’s because they didn’t want the post to come back and bite them a while because of others seeing it after the fact, or they just regularly scrubbed the account for privacy reasons, rather than anything to do with actual karma.
It’s both, I’ve seen plenty of posts on Reddit before I was banned about helping people not care so much about downvotes which they found devastating, which the answer btw is therapy, no one should care that much about the opinions of bots and a few strangers