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.


Don’t delete your stuff over downvotes ever. Say what you mean and mean what you say and if some people don’t like that oh well. The need for universal validation is killing human discourse
Being authentic means not everyone is going to like or agree with you all the time, it’s a good thing
A lot of the time people downvote stuff because it’s already downvoted.
Well, you can say stupid shit and only realize it after you already posted it.
In those situations it’s better to just edit the comment so people can still read the stupid shit with the context that the commenter doesn’t believe in the stupid shit anymore.
You saying I’m posting stupid shit without realising it?Edit : you weren’t talking about me at all my bad
And this is how you handle realising that you just posted stupid shit. You keep the the stupid shit but you also acknowledge your mistake in an edit.
Good job accidentally modeling good behaviour
“accidentally”
Just dont up/downvote period. Its malignant cancer growing in human interaction.
This gamification of human discourse is one of the leading reasons we’ve seen opinions and positions polarize and extremify over the years, because of a dopamine addiction fueled feedback loop of saying the right thing and getting massive upvotes for it, and the feedback bubbles it inevitably creates.
To the point that people skip the entire conversation and just assume upvote = right and downvote = wrong, and vote en-masse without having to think, read, or develop any analytical skill or social ability.
But the internet has an endless stream of garbage that isn’t worth your time. Would you prefer an opaque algorithm controlled by someone else to sort things for you? The transparency of fediverse voting is refreshing and the least bad option.
… Just use the damn scroll wheel and scroll down, bro.
Hell, most the garbage on the internet only exists because of these gamification mechanisms anyway, get rid of those and theres no need to farm the shit with garbage posts.
Sometimes, we say a thing we meant, but then later we learn a new thing or our perspective on an issue changes. That old post/comments can feel quite embarrassing or shameful, and removing it (or editing the original content out) can feel like the only way to still feel like you belong. If the choice is between removing one piece of your history here, or removing yourself from the community, the one piece feels like the superior choice. IF that’s the alternative.