On my first page of comments, I said, “Your comment was removed, I wonder why.” I wanted to see the context and I kept following it back and an entire thread was missing if I go back far enough. There was no wheel of death or “deleted by user” or whatever it says. There was no removal in the mod logs. I don’t think this is malice, but why aren’t they keeping up the thread and just saying “removed by mod” or “deleted by user”? It’s super confusing and it makes some really interesting threads just disappear. Is this instance rules or Lemmy rules?

  • kersplooshAEnglish
    13•6 months ago

    It looks like a user deleted their comment, causing the subsequent responses to not be shown. When I view the post from my admin account it’s all still visible to me (see the screenshot below). Though if I view the post from a non-admin account then the deleted comment and all its children are not shown.

    I agree that this is weird behavior, but I think it’s by design. In this case I would prefer that Lemmy show everyone the “deleted by creator” note and keep the rest of the comment chain visible. I am not aware of any server or community settings to change this behavior.

    • @pelespiritOPEnglish
      6•6 months ago

      It does sound like it’s by design, it’s really frustrating as a user though. I think people should at least be made aware of it and the instance admins get to choose how those comments are handled. That guy’s threads were great and should be shown.

      This isn’t relevant to this particular case, but bad actors could control the narrative by using this as a technique. Just say something crazy, wrong, misinformation, etc., it gets challenged and spoken about clearly while other great stuff comes up, bad actor just deletes their comment. Who would I bring this up with to see if it could at least be opted in to show replies to deleted comments?

      Edit: Thanks for looking into it.