Situation: Someone makes a post asking a question. I spend time answering it. Then the post is deleted.
I can no longer access the post and therefore can not find the author to block them.
What I do have is a link to an empty page.
How do I find the author?
Hopefully there isn’t a way. I get your need to find their identity, but think how that could be used for other purposes. If I decide I want to remove something, or edit it, or whatever, that should favor me, not preservation of my past activities. Yes, the internet never forgets, except it does if the content isn’t viewed enough (RIP a lot of the old web).
Anonymity should be highest priority. It sucks when it’s used for nefarious purposes, or just annoying ones. Maybe the person had second thoughts and didn’t realize anyone had seen it yet. Maybe they’re revising a new post to be clearer. Maybe they’ll see this post and realize what happened, and tell you they’re sorry.
One of the comments on the post was, “Hey, didn´t you post this a few days ago then delete it?” so this makes me think this guy is a serial offender.
Maybe it should be up to moderators to block them? But how would anyone report? Seems flawed. The system can be too heavily weighted towards control by the user and thereby allow bad actors. There needs to be some form of accountability.
Was this the one about video games playing it safe?
I wrote a rather detailed reply and it was deleted before I got to post it. Super lame
I did coincidentally interact with that post.
In retrospect, someone who earnestly asks, “why don’t they just make games so edgy that they are required to region lock the game to prevent the largest markets in the world from buying them?” probably has more than one screw loose.
But there’s the key. Enough times and someone recognizes the name and actions. It’s up to those who did remember who it was to reach out to moderation to take the next steps.
I just prefer protecting the regular user first and letting a few offenders get away with things until they make it obvious who they are. The whole innocent until proven guilty thing. Making it so any user can track down any other user and come after them feels like the wrong side of this.
I get what you’re saying, and I kind of agree, but to be honest, I’ve had this happen so many times that I’ll first look where something is posted, if it’s (for instance, there are more) asklemmy I’ll just not reply at all.
I rarely take note of who I’m writing to, and even if I asked, “is this the same guy?” I couldn’t verify because they´d have deleted their older posts! So I’d be left making blind accusations.
I don’t know what you think you are protecting users from. Blocking someone is not “coming after” them.
Giving moderation abilities to anyone opens up a lot more than just blocking. Err on the side of caution and anonymity is my only position.
It also has potential for an arms race between users who are able to do things past just posting. Even been in an ops war for a channel? Maybe not, that’s old IRC stuff.
That’s kind of a radical misreading of what I’m asking for. I’m asking for:
a) the user account of the person who wrote the post that I
b) replied to
so that I can
c) individually block them.
That’s a pretty limited power and whether a) is a “moderator ability” is completely arbitrary.
The other option, often bandied about here, is to merely delete the user name but keep the content up. That would satisfy me because I participated with the expectation that there would be a conversation and that conversation can continue without the user present.
I’m all for this, as I’ve found myself in the same boat at times and it kinda ticks me off that the time I spent trying to help was just thrown away on a whim by someone with no respect for the idea of community. They should not have control over the value of my time like that. But then again, shitty “mods” (who don’t seem to know what the origin word for their title means) have done similarly, so 🤷♀️?
What if they edited it first?
The solution seems to me to be a moderator job for someone abusing the system. They should be able to see in the logs things like this, so just need to be notified of when it happened. They could probably look at your post attempt and tie it to a name, then research that name to see if it’s a common activity. Next step is to give the user a warning (again, assume innocence first) and go from there.
Coming from the Reddit mess years ago, if I decide I want to delete my content, I want that ability. For whatever reason. If you want to take their post topic or content and open up your own post using it to continue, you have that ability.
That forces one to spend extra time to restart things that were already started. At the same time, I can see the need to allow people to delete things they might have realized they revealed too much in (or some similar reason).
My suggestion would be involving mods (although I hate to put more work on them) via a process that allows OP to request deletion, then hide it until a mod can decide if it should be deleted entirely, or just the username disassociated from it so the conversation isn’t abruptly yanked from participants.
I may be in the minority, but I do feel like that is teaching people the wrong lesson. People should be thinking before they post and treating this like an open public square. It was one of the first rules of the internet back when it started. People can easily create throw away accounts for questions they are uneasy about a question.
One of the things reddit still has on the fediverse is that they are a repository of free knowledge. If this place is treated like snapchat or instagram stories, then it may never really grow.
Also if the idea is that everything gets purged every year or so because people’s instances can’t handle the data, that’s also fine, but it should be something we become aware is just the culture of the fediverse.
I do think if that becomes the culture, that people would be less likely inclined to interact, post and try to build something that can easily just be taken down. This topic comes up often enough that it does seem to worry people.
Social media is ideally meant to be ephemeral, like a conversation you have over a gaming table. We should rather get used to things disappearing. If I wasn’t so lazy, all my comments would expire like they used to on the mothersite.
Should, yes. But just FYI; Lemmy does not work that way. Deletion/edit requests are solely up to the instance owners to comply with.
Everything you do on fediverse is public by design and is exchanged with other servers.
The only way to be “anonymous” is to make sure that your account is not connected to your real identity. However everything your account does will still be transparent.