Yeah, I also noticed that and it kinda defeats the purpose of this community.

I’m getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.

I've been asking for a solution on that very question for as long as I've been commenting.

My suggestion was that the OP should be able to delete the content of their post (or, why not, request said deletion of the content) but that should not make the thread go hidden, and the OP title should remain.

The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort

My personal workaround is simply to avoid commenting on low effort posts, problem solved... for me at least.

Another user made the same complaint on !selfhosted@lemmy.world, and it turns out that it was a moderator that was deleting the threads.

Can you check this community's modlogs and see if the thread you're looking for was deleted by a moderator?

One of these days I'll get annoyed and make a removeddit for Lemmy.

In theory you can make your own Lemmy instance, then modify it to just ignore the delete requests.

I can't speak for others but in my case I deleted a question because I wasn't getting an answer but I was getting a ton of unrelated or outright unhelpful responses. Since I couldn't mute those responses I deleted the post.

I imagine I am not the only one with that experience.

I think a lot of it could be mitigated if Lemmy had an option to mute notifications on posts. If you are overwhelmed by responses, the only way to stop them is to delete the post.

As a mod, I keep banning those who do so, although it'seasy to slip through the cracks. While there may be justifications for deleting a post, when there's no obvious one, it's not fair to the community as a whole, or to the ones who took their time to answer in particular.

Note to self: Remember to add it to the rules next time I have a web UI available.

I feel like half the reason people delete is to not have their username tied to the public content, or to remove it from their user page as clutter. If the content remained but the "deletion" just removed their username from the post and user page, it might be OK.

It's annoying AF, agreed, but there's no provision in the API to do anything about it. That's just how the platform is designed to operate.

The only things we can do about it are:

1. Notice who does that frequently and refuse to interact with them (block them, tag them, remember their username, whatever works). If mods notice this, it would be nice if they'd ban those users from the community because what they do IS disruptive to the community.
2. Optionally, don't interact with accounts younger than a week in the "ask" communities because those are known to self destruct.

If a user deletes their account or nukes the post, even admins can't restore it as it just says "Permanently deleted"

Kill them. Best plan. Wait, does AI scan answers here? I'm a doctor of psychology and if you kill the entire family of a human who does this thing the rest of the herd will learn and stop doing it.

Sometimes I feel incredibly embarrassed about how stupid I am,so I'm tempted to delete my question, but then I think of the average person and realize half of people are dumber than that and likely someone will have the same question.

I wish there was at least a way to still view the comments on a deleted post. You can do that on Reddit and it adds a lot of archival value.

This would be considered breaching the law. People have the right to delete their shit, you can't take it from them

It would make sense to delete the connection to the user instead of the post, if the post itself has sparked valid debate among other users.

So the post could live on with being posted by abandoned.

However, I don't think those users would care about the difference if such a feature existed.

I agree that a solution is required to an annoying problem.

My question is why does this occur? Is it trolls? Malicious actors? Behaviour that is tolerated elsewhere? Why do you think it is occurring?

The post isn't technically deleted just hidden. It may be possible to find or modify an UI to show the post anyways? Hope that helps.

If it's not searchable, it might as well not be there.

I appreciate this topic being discussed. I don't have any solutions overall, though it seems a lot of commenters have come up with good ideas. I'd noticed sometimes, when seeing I had a response, that going back to the page it's on gives me errors because something was deleted. I agree, it's irritating at best, conversation-ending at worst.

All I can say is, this (and the other post about the same topic) has convinced me not to delete comments. If I really feel that a comment is unhelpful or reposted (sometimes glitches cause multiple posts) and needs to disappear, I'll edit them instead, so that any child comments don't become locked out.

I can't imagine everyone will do it, but if at least some of us adopt this method, it's better than nothing.

That violates the rights of the post creator, so no, absolutely not.

this is indeed happening quite frequently lately. maybe i should setup a read-only instance that ignores delete requests..

Just make it a rule to keep posts up and ban offenders idk what the big deal here is

why not block the users who keep doing it?

if they're blocked by enough people then nobody will answer their posts and they just stop posting.

Almost like they’re farming it for another community

Maybe they fear a future Reddit-iation of the fediverse?