To preface none of my fellow admins know about this post due to the language that I am using.
Although I do believe that they would be supportive of this as they care about our users just as much as I do.
I just had a run in with a user asking for help who then deleted their post and comments soon after.
If you see any users asking for help I would personally recommend a couple of things to look out for:
- Check their profile;
- how old’s the account?
- what kinds of posts and comments are they making?
- Are they the kind of user you’d be cool with being friends with?
- Do they have history of deleting posts/comments? If so why? and how often?
- Check the modlog;
- have they done or said anything that warrented themselves getting banned or their posts/comments removed?
I’m making this post as I’m personally frustrated seeing posts and comments being removed as it actively harms instances, communities, and most importantly users.
I absolutely despise when I go a saved post or comment thread that I wanted to reread later only to find that I can’t cause the post/thread’s been deleted by a single user.
There’s so much useful or interesting and creative things that people care about and also want to share in terms of life experiences or just having a cool thing to collaborate and work on.
- having this be ruined by individuals that want to ‘dine and dash’ basically ruins this.
Honestly Fuck you.
If you ‘help farm’ especially I will find you and I will ban you because you are actively harming users who spend their precious time, effort, and humanly love to do cool stuff here on the Fediverse.
I am less concerned with the long term traces we leave. Social interactions are ephemeral (or were, prior to moving them to the Internet) and we are here trying to meet our social needs, not necessarily to Build A Better World. I am all for the things we say naturally expiring and falling out of the record.
What bothers me is how a living conversation can be killed. And in such a way as to make it difficult even to find the people you were just interacting with again, if you don’t happen to remember their account ID.