this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Why can't we properly delete comments? (feddit.uk)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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When I "delete" a comment, all it does is replace the text with "deleted by creator". It doesn't even hide my username. This is different from previous behaviour where the comment was entirely removed from the public view.

I should be in control of my comment. If I want to delete it then it should be entirely removed - at least from the public view. I don't want to make comments knowing that I'm permenantly etching my username into the stone of the thread forever with no ability to delete it. I'm highly put off from engaging now that I can't reliably delete what I write.

Being able to undo the deletion is fine but the undo really should only last 1h or maybe 24h before the comment is properly deleted.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It takes time. Things I've deleted still show up as "deleted by creator" but only for maybe a day or two. After that, they completely vanish and I'm unable to find them even with a saved link.

I don't know if this is because of the undo feature, or just the inherent nature of how lemmy sends things around to other instances.

That said...

I don't want to make comments knowing that I'm permenantly etching my username into the stone of the thread forever with no ability to delete it.

You shouldn't be posting online at all then. Even if the service you use works flawlessly and timely in obeying your request for deletion, it doesn't affect any number of other factors that could cement your posts online forever. This used to be rule 1 of the Internet: don't post anything you don't want out in the world forever. Someone or something can be archiving and reposting anything and everything you or anyone else posts anywhere on the public Internet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is the pull request that changed the behaviour, for the curious. They changed it because deleting the comment entirely broke a lot of stuff, like viewing replies to deleted comments.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thanks. From the linked discussion, it does solve a legitimate problem - I had noticed that entire comment branches could be lost if a parent comment was deleted or removed. That was also pretty bad, so I'm glad there's been progress there.

Honestly I think reddit's approach is correct: when I delete my comment, other see that a comment existed here once, but not what it said or who wrote it, and it's no longer interactive. And, deleting it doesn't affect child comments.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Part of this was a fix for the broken threads. It's not really fair for a user to delete their comment and then completely remove all the other comments underneath. Before one of the recent updates, the threads underneath would get completely buggered, killing the conversation.

It's not hard to see how this could be used maliciously. Someone could say something, be corrected and put in their place, only for them to delete their top comment and spoil the conversation.

The far bigger issue is that you can actually view the deleted comment. I've done it in Jerboa, simply starting a reply to the deleted comment lets you see it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

It’s not hard to see how this could be used maliciously. Someone could say something, be corrected and put in their place, only for them to delete their top comment and spoil the conversation.

Someone did that to me once; it was very frustrating. They posted a wrong thing, got corrected by me and others, their post got downvoted and the corrections got upvoted. So they delete their comment (and ours) and repost the same thing again. Get corrected again, votes pan out again...so they do it again. Basically repeated the trick until the others in the conversation gave up and left them to it.

Glad to hear it's fixed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This is an feature of Lemmy, so I don't think there's much we can do. It should be easy enough to sort out because it's already checking it's your post to offer you the undelete option, so it could just hide a deleted post from everyone other than the user or moderators. However, it'd need to be flagged up to the Lemmy developers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Fair, I was hoping it'd be something you could configure. Hopefully this improves with Lemmy in the future then.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'll have a nose around but I think it's just part of the functionality and may need to sorted through a feature request to the devs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Strictly speaking you can do something about it - there's nothing that says you have to run pure, unmodified lemmy code. However, unless you're a hotshot dev yourself I wouldn't expect it, and also deviating from the core codebase is not really something that should be encouraged.

It's definitely something users should be aware of, though. At the end of the day we're all putting a great deal of trust in our instance and its admin, even moreso than the lemmy developers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

We can purge the comment as administrators, which removes the comment (from this instance as far as I'm aware). I believe it also culls the thread down from there.

People are welcome to ask for us to purge, and if it's appropriate we can...However, once a comment had been federated to another instance, I believe that's up to whatever instance it's propagated to, and removing would be akin to removing from archive.org.

The code may change in the future (anyone can contribute), and if this becomes an instance-level option, we may engage the community to see if there is a clear preference.

I've already been caught out by it myself, and had to edit the comment. (In that case, explaining that I'd got two things confused)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

However, once a comment had been federated to another instance, I believe that’s up to whatever instance it’s propagated to

Yeah that's a very good point. However, your instance will have fulfilled its responsibility, at least.

At the end of the day though, anything you publish online should be considered lost, in a practical sense. Even if lemmy adds a feature to facilitate permanent deletion, it's up to each instance to actually implement it - much like it would be up to internet scrapers to delete the content they collect from anywhere and everywhere.

lemmy isn't without its bugs - like I mentioned in another comment, it's now possible for users to view deleted comments, at least in certain apps (in Jerboa, if you start a reply to a deleted comment you'll see it). But it's steadily evolving.

I'm still waiting for more instance agnostic links for things. feddit.uk/comment/123456 is different to lemmy.world/comment/123456, but what we should have is something more like a federated host at feddit.uk/comment/123456, then copies should be lemmy.world/comment/[email protected]. As it is now, there is no straightforward way to go from a comment or post in one instance to the same in another. You have to manually search the community or user. I think maybe there are ways for apps to do this through the back-end API, but this should really be there on the front end. It's annoying when someone gives you a link to another instance and you can't reply to it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You’ll probably be unhappy to learn that federated comments may never be deleted. The external server has to both listen for the delete request and adhere to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I know that. But at least that's not really publicly listed for anyone to load from my home server in the original comment thread. And that's beyond the server host's control anyway; it's completely within the server host's control to decide to delete something properly on request or not, so choosing to not delete it is just weird.

Rather than having some control over my comment in the source thread on the source server, I now have zero control at all. That's not a good user experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Rather than having some control over [thing I put on the internet], I ~~now~~ have zero control at all.

Correct. Everything you post online can and will be instantly archived by data hoarders and data corporations.

That's not a good user experience.

That's the World Wide Web for you, we should have stopped at gopher.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Everything you post online can and will be instantly archived by data hoarders and data corporations

I don't agree with your implication that because someone somewhere might be archiving my comment, then there's no point in giving users a proper delete button.

There's also a huge difference between my comment being publicly accessible in the original thread versus stored elsewhere in some archivist's database. Obviously nobody can control the latter but that doesn't mean there's no point in controlling the former.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's a distinction without a difference.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

maybe to you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As for your username being attached to the comment, that is an issue. I just checked, and yeah even logged out you still see it.

What needs to be done is the deleted comment should only have your username visible when you're logged in - everyone else should see a blank username, maybe moderators should be able to see it though.

However I disagree about the timeout. I want to be able to recover my comments indefinitely. If there is to be a permanent deletion (and legally speaking there probably needs to be, one which removes it from the server) it should be an extra step.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

There are, I guess, three front end levels.

Delete, moderator delete (invisible to all but mods, at least for top level posts), and Purge (admin level, wipes the content from the local database).

I'm hoping to have a bit of a dive and an experiment once things have settled down here a bit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wondered this - nothing major, but I replied to the wrong comment in a thread, so reposted the reply where I'd meant it to be, and deleted the original - but it left the post there marked as deleted, looking like I'd done something really suspicious.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

username checks out