How do I identify someone who has deleted their post?
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?
44 replies
You are actively taking time out of your day to block a person who didn't stick around long enough to hear you out
You need to go outside and touch grass. Get a girlfriend or boyfriend, those are fun too
This is pitiful
I guess if your median reply is 20 words long, yeah, it would seem pitiful. But some people actually put effort into their conversations.
A would never block someone deciding to remove his post. It is pitiful to do it
It doesn't matter, they are asking a technical question and you are replying with a moral thing to do..
That's your opinion
Never? Interesting.
For deleting a post yes never
Well, I didn't want to block them JUST for deleting the post, but for deleting two posts of the same subject, and also they seemed to be wanting to gripe about wokeness, but just looking for a way to do it that wouldn't be noticeable--all-in-all, somebody that would probably post a question that would get a lengthy reply from me that would be rejected when I hit send because the post would be gone. So I think it's reasonable to block them to prevent that from happening.
I understand deleting posts, I've done it myself, but someone who does it habitually while posting bait....
Shrug, cancel your reply, move on. Be a goldfish.
this is not really a solution and it's not gonna work if you use an app. but i just use this browser addon+@ called hoardy web to save every page i visit locally. then i can revisit that page later on.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking might be a partial solution. Thanks for the tip!
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.
Should, yes. But just FYI; Lemmy does not work that way. Deletion/edit requests are solely up to the instance owners to comply with.
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.
At that point wouldn’t it just be easier to resurrect AIM, MSN and other chat rooms? Most of those places has conversations that just went away.
When Digg and later Reddit were created, they weren’t even classified as social media. The term wasn’t really created until a couple years after Facebook opened its doors publicly. These types of platforms were compared more to forums, because of the conversation aggregation. If we create a culture of data deletion, I feel we would just be carving out more paths to the larger companies that are taking digital content away from us, and even destroying physical information for control.
You say that like I left that era willingly.
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.
You can tag users, and that tag will then appear next to their username on all their posts and comments.
Of course that won't help retrospectively, but if a user keeps posting and deleting the same thing you can tag them when you notice, and then when they do it again you can see the tag you gave them previously.
For past deletions, probably no easy way.
For future deletions, just spin up your own instance and ignore delete requests.
The "why no more risky video games?" post was mentioned in this thread. If it was moderator intervention and you remember the post title and instance it was on you can try to look up the modlog and see if you can find it there. Open the web version and scroll down to the bottom to see the link.
I use a third-party client that puts the baby emoji by the user name for new accounts. In the age of bots and repeat sock puppet account offenders, you reply to baby emojis in great detail at your own peril. You could make it part of your routine that if you wrote more than 100 words in reply to somebody you snap a quick screenshot of the post before you move on.
Some instances are slow handling deletions or don’t honour them at all….
How horrible. Which ones?
I would either copy the name into your reply OR open the post in another tab that you keep open until your satisfied.
edit: wait a second... you're not gonna delete this are you? /s
I rarely pay attention to the name of the person unless I recognize it through other conversations. I respond to the content and intent. I've had the same thing happen to me on various platforms over the many years, where I started a reply and when I hit submit it got an error because they deleted. Just move on, why hunt someone down for something that may or may not have even been on purpose? Revenge for time lost seems... well. Let's just say this post may be more in the heat of the moment and not thinking how it looks.
Meh. I'm not looking for revenge, I just don't want to waste my time on this person again who, from other comments on the thread, does this often enough to be flagged by other users.
Excellent suggestion, ~~![email protected] !
Hm... interesting. Did you know your userid doesn't autopopulate?~~
! is for communities, @ is for users. Example: @[email protected].
Oops. Thanks, @[email protected]!
Can't be deleted... Because it was never real
deleted by creator
blocked! lol