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Please be Advised for Help Farmers

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.

11 comments

  • What upset me the most about this wasn't that it happened to me but the fact that I saw that this was a repeated bahavior and I can imagine just how annoying and infuriating it feels to be on the recieving end of it for several other users.

    I can deal with it as I've got backup methods from experience so for me it's annoying but eh whatever. I'm just annoyed because I know that others have had to experience this zero-sum behavior as well.

    • I get the feeling. An adjacent behaviour I've seen is someone making a few aggressive comments on one account, getting them removed and a ban, then deleting that account and creating an alt so that their reputation is now "clean" again.

      • Yeah that's another good one to point out.👍

        I find those users entertaining when I see them cause their poor behavior is what got them banned in the first place; a new account's gonna do jack shit to improve that

        You reminded me I should also add a "check the account's age"🙌🌻

  • It's a blunt instrument, but I've been temp-banning any new account that posts to any of the various "ask" communities. When I check back on them a few days later, 99% of them show up as "ERROR" when I view them on their home instance.

    The upside is that with them being banned at the time they nuke their accounts, the delete request is not accepted and the content/replies remain available.

    I'm to the point I'm considering patching the server to ignore federated account deletions since they're being abused by a small number of people in a way that affects the majority of users.

  • The questions belong to the users, there is no contention about that.

    However the answers belong to those who offered them, making the entire conversation belong to the community as a whole.

    Unfortunately I seriously doubt that Lemmy will ever change its behavior in this regard. Keeping a post up after deletion smacks too much of Reddit behavior, and Lemmy defines itself in Reddit's shadow. :-(

    Fortunately PieFed has no such limitation, so asking for a feature to help deal with this issue seems to have a very good chance of working on it. :-)

    • It's true that just keeping a 'deleted' placeholder with all the comments would already be an improvement

      • I think it's the only fair compromise. I think we should respect a right to delete. But I don't think that right to delete should be powerful enough to smother discussion. The person who started the communal thread should not have the power to silence everyone who participates.

      • iirc, deleted comments remain in the profile of the user that wrote them. So a lot of the value lies not in "having those answers", but in placing those answers side-by-side along with the question. Which allows things like someone having the same question searching for it by keyword, and then finding the answers that they seek underneath that heading. For such to work then, we would need the actual text (& title) of the question.

        But then that wraps back around to who owns the question... and shouldn't the owner be allowed to delete it, or edit it however they wish? Which makes me think: there is no system that will work in the face of malicious or at least inattentive bad actors. Perhaps social media is just a bad place to have such a question-and-answer forum, in favor of things such as wikipedia or more specialized forums (StackOverflow comes to mind).

        I liked Admiral Patrick's take on it: ultimately we cannot control others, only ourselves, so he prevents brand-new accounts from being able to make posts in those communities in the first place, knowing that there is such a high likelihood that they are an attention vampire that will leave hurt feelings of frustration (and sometimes even betrayal) in the wake of their passing. But he only controls one instance, so at best it is only a test of what might work at a larger scale.

        I do note that afaik PieFed's moderation abilities could automate that though (at least it should be able to? admittedly I have not tested this first-hand, only read about it long ago): e.g. it could prevent anyone with an account less than a certain age from making posts, as he does. It is one solution at least, hopefully we can dream up others as well! :-)

  • 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.

11 comments