I’ve seen this happen a bunch of time now that people just ask a question and it’s deleted a day or so later. Do they delete the question themselves, or is that some automatic thing? If they do it themselves, why?

*edit*

Thanks for the great answers so far. Very insightful. Please keep them coming, I’m curious to more points of view.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    51·
    8 hours ago

    To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

    Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

    There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.

    • Smee@poeng.link
      1·
      4 hours ago

      5mb tool to delete comments. Also available as an .exe

      Feels like smashmouth_heynow.mp3.exe all over again lol

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow.

      those need to be reported and banned, their replies mass deleted.

      Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway,

      Because we don’t have a proper (or any) system for subscribing to threads. but if I have saved a link for myself for future reference, it’ll be gone!

      I’m just saying, don’t be surprised if people start running instances that disobey deletions