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.
I consider the downvote button to be the “fuck off” button, which I reserve for toxic comments or posts made in bad faith. I try to be generous with upvotes and sparing with downvotes, but some people here go straight for the downvote button and pile on more downvotes when something is already downvoted. If I see someone getting downvoted heavily who is acting in good faith, I’ll give them an upvote, even if I don’t necessarily agree. Otherwise, withholding an upvote is what I consider the correct response when I don’t agree or am not interested.
I do often delete my comment if I’m told to fuck off by too many people, mainly because it’s the first thing I’ll see in my client the next time I login, which will make me less motivated to engage next time.
You should be able to challenge the echo chamber or play devil’s advocate without being downvoted into oblivion. It doesn’t indicate a site is open to discussion and it looks more like a self gratification fest.
Occasionally I’ll leave a flippant reply, realize i was being kind of an ass, then delete it because I’ve realized leaving it up may be doing more harm than good in some way. That’s what downvotes are for IMO - it’s like the immune system of Lemmy, pruning off the unwanted shit.
I believe, though, that this post is about the phenomenon of people making a post (not just a comment), then the post accumulates hundreds of votes & comments and the creator of that post hits delete for whatever reason. Which sucks because that wipes the post as well as the comments.
This is something that needs to be fixed IMO. One theory is it’s done to collect training data, psychological or market research - something along those lines. This is one of those rare places on the web where authentic human responses from a diverse cross-section of people can be harvested. If deletion wipes out all of it, those responses are captured and gone from the internet before too many competing bots and indexers can get to them.
More likely because they get a bunch of hostile replies and downvotes and say “fuck it”. They don’t want to see it piled up in their notifications.