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 appreciate that this is an open source community where speech is more flexible which is what I was drawn to about lemmy but as with before I got banned on reddit, if I feel if my posts are embarrassing or show that they have no value to the people I am talking to, then I will remove them to not clog thread space.
As an alternative to deleting a post (which also deletes all other people’s comments) you can also edit your post and replace it with a “.” or “deleted” or similar.
There have been so many times that I go back to find a comment i remember, but can’t find anything because OP deleted a post, which isn’t how it works on reddit.
funny enough I use “Deleted” or “.” on a different forum. So I’ll do that here if the conversation hasn’t surpassed too many comments going back and forth because just because someone doesn’t directly agree with my opinion or what I think or even doesn’t believe anything factual that has source links given along with it doesn’t mean that the information throughout the argument or conversation can’t be valuable to someone else.