When should you consider it a good idea to delete your comments?
(I'm tagging as ask.advice and ask.discussion because while my motivation to make this comes from my comments I'm not the only one who this could apply to and deleting coments is very much a general topic.)
So basically, I wrote this comment, noone agrees with it and the contrary takes all are upvoted, so should I delete it? If noone agreed with what I had to say and upvoted contrary answers, then what I said wasn't valuable to anyone, and so I should delete it, right?
This also applies to quite a few comments I have written that have 0 votes like this, this this and this.
In the other hand, measuring a comment's value by how many people voted on it isn't that great and leaving clarifications and tecnical/minor details and if someone replied, even if only to point out your comment as wrong or not so unlikely, so other than the third comment, you can argue they aren't entirely bad. (And leaving someone's answer without a question is pretty bad if someone comes later since they wouldn't know why that answer was there.) So where does one draw the line?
I think OP is over thinking things for the most part, and interestingly enough his comment started a large comment chain, which is, itself, significant. (Also that is why I am here, for the discussions)
I do not generally delete comments, unless I look back and that I was being a dick, spreading misinformation, or my understand has changed since then. (Sometimes I just strike through the wrong parts)
The other reason to delete comments is for privacy concerns.
I think it's much better to strike out the text. Many others probably have the same general opinion as you and seeing your comment challenged may help them change their mind also.
I feel like the idea of votes gets in the way of the conversation itself - I enjoyed it when Tildes was hiding the scores for a while there, one less pedantic distraction when reading. Votes have jack shit to do with how good a comment is, and that becomes more and more true with larger numbers of users voting for a larger and larger pool of subjective reasons - just look at any reddit comment thread.
I delete my account when I move on from a forum. Just blew away all of my reddit accounts with j0be's power delete suite last month and it felt wonderful to finally put that cesspool behind me. The only other reasons I can think to delete a comment is if I find out I made a lot of false statements (usually an edit is enough), or if I made a drunk/high post I regret when reflecting on it soberly. Perhaps if something was a possible privacy concern as well, but I tend not to make those kinds of comments in the first place.
I loved tildes without vote counts. I hid my own so I don't go back and feel all 'hmph' when my rambling isn't validated.
It'd be great to have an option to hide it. I tried to hide the karma count, but my CSS isn't strong enough.
The closest working solution I have is to add this to Stylus.
Congrats on getting away from reddit.
Eh, I made a bit of a last stand, but the mod apathy over there is positively apocalyptic. So apocalyptic, in fact, that they still haven't updated the sidebar with new multireddits in the main l2t account. I wonder if any of the current subscribers noticed the sidebar imploded, or cared. Both would surprise me. I think that caliber of music lover moved on from there a longass time ago.
The bots have turned it into an antiseptic place, and now we see the price of too much automation implemented flawlessly without remembering the human. It stretches thin, breaks the back of the community. It's the wrong kind of automation. That was a great lesson to learn, though.
I knew something was fishy when it took them two extra days to unlock listentothis after the music blackout earlier this year. The ones that are left, seems like it's just a job they don't want to do, and that's modding on reddit in a nutshell. I checked their activity levels in the mod logs - crickets. The bots reign supreme. A couple gave me shit for being inactive for two years, but they've no high ground to stand on there. Fixing the place would take work, and it's work nobody wants to do.
I mentioned the mess to the admins, and their response reminded me instantly why I stopped giving a shit about reddit. That was the moment I deleted my account - well, deleted... more like archived and erased from reddit. Eternal september can have listentothis. It can't evolve beyond what it is now in a place like reddit.
I can't blame them, I checked out too. I was done with reddit and wanted to contribute to a replacement instead. That's why I ended up here. A lot of the rest of the team got married, finished college, and got lives so they didn't have the time to mod anymore. The best of the old crew are here on Tildes, so I don't feel like I'm leaving much behind. I'm confident the rest will follow in time. They all know where we went, and why. Tildes is no secret.
I am enjoying the posts from the subscribers bitching about the quality slide more now that I'm not at the top of the mod list and obligated to give a damn about it, though. The best part of that little return was getting into the redditmods slack, that place is mainlining schadenfreude and they have a pretty banging music channel of their own.
Getting things together on reddit was always like pulling teeth, even in l2t. It was spared by a quirk of topic matter from 99% of the bullshit (including the fighting/politics) that kills reddit. That stuff almost never happens in music comment sections. We got it so damn easy compared to the rest of reddit, so easy it could be automated. If you don't believe that, go ahead, check music video/track comments on youtube sometime. Even /mu/ is the most civil part of 4chan (by chan standards, at least). Something so common everywhere else is curiously missing from music threads, and the forum tech seems not to matter.
I think Deimos said it best in the Tildes announcement - it's hard to maintain a quality community when you have to fight an unending battle against the platform itself. If we can stick to that philosophy long term this place is going to get pretty wild. Just imagine having the source code and an admin staff that's on your side for a change. In a place like this, something like listentothis shouldn't even be necessary - it's just a specialized by popularity view of all the music content, like new releases would be.
If I'm going to do more music bestofs I'd rather do them here on Tildes - I know we'll get more participation here, even now, than we usually did on reddit. Depends how many folks are up for spending a couple hundred hours listening to music albums. That's the time consuming part - playlists are easy. It should be fun come November, assuming the world is still here by then.
It's me (except the married part). The burnout is real.
I truly think listentothis started going downhill after it became a default (and I say this as someone who advocated for it at the time) -- the "community" got too big to have soul, and then modding it became soulless. The bots helped for a while but after a while started removing whatever independent character that was left. Not sure there's any way to fix it other than starting over somehow.
That's exactly what happened. The worst of it was there's no way to check all the rules at once and tell the submitter all the things that were wrong. We had to use like five tools to check fifty rules, and just how many times is someone going to resubmit something? Submitting there from mobile cramps the fingers just because of the titles. Now type it twenty times! /facepalm
Reddit's prehistoric forum tech is a big part of the problem. Gimme a form-based submission page and most go away. Having the bot handle the title/genre/other stuff on the backend during submission solves the rest. At that point you're just pasting links to post. We knew all this ten years ago and reddit couldn't lift a finger the entire time - that's pretty pathetic innovation.
My pitch was moving the rules that listentothis has now over to truelistentothis (where they won't have to deal with 16 million people and can become more kind). Then change listentothis over to approved submitters only, and all you have to do to get on the list is give enough of a damn to ask. And because they ask, they've shown they have an interest in the topic matter - obscure music. Vet the people instead of the submissions themselves.
Let the humans make the judgement again, not the bots... though they'd still be lurking looking for tracy chapman level violations I think. It becomes a big fat radio station with truelistentothis as the control booth, encourage the approved submitters to crosspost the good stuff from tl2t over in l2t. Two subs, one mission, and a lot less bot nonsense. We rescue the original listentothis from itself and put it to work driving the monster it created.
Then we have what reddit can by their nature never give us - a working banhammer. Spammers get in, easy enough to deal with. People posing off topic content for karma - also easy to deal with. Just like Tildes, control the access. Most people will never run afoul of the rules because most people aren't assholes - at least in a music forum. The other folks in redditmods were telling me they've got approved submitter lists up into the 40k-50k range without issue and there are several bots to manage it via PMs, just send a list of usernames to add or remove.
I'd also go into the hundreds with the mod list, draft everyone - and tell them to work on modding the music rather than any of the busywork reddit tasks everyone with. Let reddit pay someone to do that job. Volunteers get to be picky how they spend their time. You want to scare reddit admins, get that attitude to spread among the site's moderators. ;)
I think that might resurrect it... but in the end, it's still marooned on reddit and doomed by their limitations, and only necessary in the first place because of their limitations. Tildes' design sidesteps those silly issues quite handily, so I've no truck leaving that place the mess it is. I feel slightly dirty at the thought of doing anything that benefits reddit in any way.
I generally don't delete comments for any reason besides routine privacy/security. IMO deleting comments actually ends up detracting from the conversation. Not everyone gets to a thread while it's hot... I fairly regularly go through older threads because I try to search before I post, and any time I go through a thread with deleted comments it's much harder to understand or even contribute further. Hell, I just went back to a thread I posted in yesterday and saw a few deleted comments from the chains I was involved in, and that robbed me of the opportunity to reconsider their point of view.
The corollary to this approach is that you need to take the time to ensure what you're posting is worth the effort in the first place. If I'm deleting posts because I don't feel validated with support or even because I'm wrong about something, the bigger issue is handling my ego properly.
If you've changed your mind but aren't too embarrassed about changing your mind, I think it would be nice to edit the comment and put a brief note at the top saying so, and leave the original statement for history's sake. ("Proposal withdrawn" or "Edit: I don't believe this anymore [...]" or "Correction: actually [...]")
Deleting the whole thing would be safest if you're worried about leaving a record of it, but that depends on how paranoid you are about pseudonymity not being enough to protect you, or it being inflammatory enough to drive discussion further off the rails.
I tend to leave everything up except when it includes some sort of personal information that can be used to doxx or if I included some kind of misinformation in the post and I’m not ruining any discussion context by getting rid of it.
I also just straight up delete my Reddit account and make a new one every couple of years to avoid building up too much of a persona that can be doxxed. And with my latest one I’m trying to just delete everything that’s more than a couple of weeks to a month old unless it has actual pertinent information/discussion that I can imagine someone would want to reference in the future. Doing the filtering really makes it clear how much of my activity on that site is utterly valueless crap and has tended to keep me away from posting at all, which is probably for the best.
The only time I would delete a comment if I wrote it in a state of irrational anger and came back to it saner regretting what I had written before. If you make a comment stating what you believe, and nobody else agrees with you, deleting it unless you have been completley persuaded detracts from good debate.
Fair. I've calmed down/mellowed out a bit more and I kinda made this post like that too, but sad.
I guess since I like census operations a lot (I'm the one who asked for a census last year), some suggestions being negatively taken, and other suggestions being apparently ignored cut deeper than it should and the other comments I cited kind of let me emotionally validate the feeling that it's not a comment, it's a problem.
Thankfully I've always liked that in the Internet in general you can get lots of answers from lots of different people (I sometimes call it "harvesting thoughts") and I didn't want to judge my posts pretty much by vote count, I made this post to ask this site first.
I guess that's one of those things that can't really happen on reddit, since there are plentiful of comments like that aside yours and reddit obviously isn't a platform for serious discussion so if you say something and it gets no upvotes, it was probably a short reaction.
Idk if I'm a minority on here, but I only normal vote for comments which stand out to me. I skimmed through the thread on the census and didn't vote on anything. Not because I disagreed with anything, but out of a combination of thoughtlessness and a complete ignorance of census operations I didnt see anything that made me think I want more people to see this.
Every once in a while I delete a comment because I was pissed off when I wrote it and then came back to it later and didn't want to stir up trouble.
I finally cut Reddit out of my life today, and every once in a while there I would go through and delete comments below like 10 karma because I figure they weren't all that useful to people anyway and I'm paranoid about being doxed.
I only delete comments when I realize that I commented out of anger and my opinion has changed once I calmed down.
I have a filter on my browser that discourages me from going back thru my old comments. It is hard not to get into vain vote-counting worries. If you can't help but look back over your comments and feel like you don't recognize yourself in them then perhaps you could delete or edit, but honestly it's better just to keep posting and save yourself the concern. It's useful to gauge reception, but there's not much point to clearing out "unsuccessful" suggestions.
I delete comments when:
It took maybe two weeks of using yikyak as a youngin' to realize that upvotes are completely agnostic of any real value, and are merely a token of communal solidarity. These days I don't delete anything, least of all because I get downvoted or ratio'd or whatever. I do often leave posts unfinished though, because I can't adequately make my case without going into enough depth to make it it's own Medium article.
Honestly, whenever you feel like it. I think people should delete things whenever they decide they don't want it to exist anymore. A bunch of people wanting to argue with you and you don't want to deal with it anymore? Delete the comment. Comment or post isn't getting the traction you want and you want to delete it? Fuck it, go for it. Made a comment while drunk and you don't want it to exist anymore? zap Gone. Just don't want the comment to be there anymore and don't have any other reason? Delete it.
I've taken to nuking my posts on Mastodon after 120 days just because I view conversation on there as ephemeral and non-permanent whereas on Tildes/Reddit style sites I don't tend to delete comments wholesale as I find I think of conversations on those style of sites as more permanent I guess?