On lemmy, downvotes are as much a badge of honor as upvotes. Chase the controversy! That's what the design incentivizes.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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They need to imagine for a second that there is no differnce between upvotes and downvotes. I make a anti commie statment in a crowd of tankies and those downvotes are validation of the truth for me. I see so many black and white hottakes online and getting downvotes for throwing a little nuance into their soured perceptions is honestly quite fun.
The Internet points don't matter and never mattered on any platform.
Have you ever met internet people? Basically all of them are idiots; who cares what they think?
Yes. Sometimes driving through down town, I see a specific type of person where you just know these are the fucking morons you spend time arguing online with. Completely out of touch with reality but claim to be all wise.
I never deleted my comments on reddit, even if they got downvoted like crazy by the mob
I liked going back and posting the Hannibal Burress meme every few years.
WHY IS EVERYONE BOOING, I'M RIGHT
You delete your posts because of karma.
I delete them because they display my embarrassing incompetence for all to see.
We are not the same.
If you are controlled by cringe, there is cringe in you. If you are controlled by anger, there is anger in you. If you are moved by the world, the world lives rent-free in your head. Be empty, as the Buddha described, and then you will act in your full power, not simply react to the world. If you are always reacting, you are not in control of yourself. Free will is a skill. I pooped my pants while righting this. It tastes funny.
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I'm onto you now. Better delete this to be safe.
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I recently cheated on lemmy with reddit for a couple days. I'm back to lemmy. I like the community more and I find myself scrolling way less. I get what I would want to get out of reddit without sooooo much bullshit that you end up scrolling for an hour without even realizing it.
I recently cheated on lemmy with reddit for a couple days.
You bare-bottomed whore of Babylon! I bet you've been pouting at twitter and blue sky too. And facebook's had it's slimy hands all over you, I can smell it from here
Ooooooowaaah. Is it a perfumey smell or a musty aroma ?
Sounds like some real bot ass activity. Own your down votes, you've earned them.
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.
Don’t delete your stuff over downvotes ever. Say what you mean and mean what you say and if some people don’t like that oh well. The need for universal validation is killing human discourse
Being authentic means not everyone is going to like or agree with you all the time, it’s a good thing
Well, you can say stupid shit and only realize it after you already posted it.
In those situations it's better to just edit the comment so people can still read the stupid shit with the context that the commenter doesn't believe in the stupid shit anymore.
~~You saying I'm posting stupid shit without realising it?~~
Edit : you weren't talking about me at all my bad
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I consider the downvote button to be the “fuck off” button, which I reserve for toxic comments or posts made in bad faith. I try to be generous with upvotes and sparing with downvotes, but some people here go straight for the downvote button and pile on more downvotes when something is already downvoted. If I see someone getting downvoted heavily who is acting in good faith, I’ll give them an upvote, even if I don’t necessarily agree. Otherwise, withholding an upvote is what I consider the correct response when I don’t agree or am not interested.
I do often delete my comment if I’m told to fuck off by too many people, mainly because it’s the first thing I’ll see in my client the next time I login, which will make me less motivated to engage next time.
You should be able to challenge the echo chamber or play devil's advocate without being downvoted into oblivion. It doesn't indicate a site is open to discussion and it looks more like a self gratification fest.
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Are you sure people are deleting their posts? The last time this came up people went nuts making assumptions about the stupid things users were doing deleting their posts, and it turned out to be a mod.
One of the admins on a previous lemmy server I was on absolutely cheesed me off (also, I donated to that server).
So, I deleted my posts to stop the server getting attention, especially a few of them were actively supporting the network
The admin was defending an absolute nutter who was admin on another server who was trying to shut down any opinions and discussions.
The rest of the admins were awesome, but after seeing that, it just felt weird to support them.
Even if you're on Reddit, deleting your post/comment because of downvotes is cowardly. Is your ego so fragile you won't stand by your own words because of imaginary internet points?
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I was talking about this in another thread the other day, and somebody pointed out that, on the fediverse, every post gets pushed out everywhere. So, a user deleting their own post is just asking pretty please if all the federated instances will respect its deletion.
I don't think that all fediverse clients/portals delete the comments along with the posts. IIRC, Voyager lets you look at the comments on deleted posts, at least I think I've seen my own comment after the post was deleted.
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Why delete your posts yourself when you can just post to .ml and have them delete them for you?
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I would assume that embarrassment drives most deletes here.
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