this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
72 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

49304 readers
845 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

In an attempt to boost activity I've tried to answer a few questions in this, and similar communities. Looking for an old comment, I found out that a bunch of posts I'd answered are now *Permanently Deleted*, and what's that about? If they're LLM slop there's enough of it I'd rather just block the community so as to not waste any time.

all 39 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] BertramDitore@lemmy.zip 46 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It’s annoying, I see it a lot too. I think it’s mostly people second-guessing or regretting their own comments or posts. I’ve had great conversations with people, only to go back and find the whole thread was deleted. That has happened way more than I would have expected.

I don’t think it has anything to do with LLMs or slop (and I hate the slop), just people afraid of admitting they’re wrong or leaving an unpopular opinion out in the world after it’s been sufficiently argued away.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Must be a gen z thing.

[–] blarghly@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because they asked a stupid question

[–] amio@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

... can't really argue with that

[–] Dookieman12@piefed.social 20 points 2 days ago (4 children)

That just means OP deleted their post. This can happen for many reasons, but the most common is they get embarrassed at the replies, decide they don't want it on their post history, or they think the downvotes mean something, like on Reddit

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Or get sick of the avalanche of replies in their inbox, since you can't turn off notifications for responses to a post or comment unlike on reddit. The only way to make it stop is to delete whatever it was.

Also I'm pretty sure by default if a user deletes their Lemmy account most clients also automatically delete all of their posts and comments. If a user gets fed up with us or decides the Fediverse is not for them, when they take their ball and go home that's really what happens.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I found turning off notifications completely improved my lemmy experience. I'll check them and clear them periodically in my own time.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't help either that the default web UI doesn't actually clear off your notification bell even if you're marked all replies as read until you force refresh the page. That's kind of annoying.

Other interfaces like Alexandrite and I presume Photon do it a little better.

[–] unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

the default web UI

Isn't that the Tesseract from the recent trama?

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Luckily, it most certainly is not. Tesseract is a (probably now very defunct) third party client.

[–] Dookieman12@piefed.social 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah, that too. I block the notification element with my adblocker

[–] amio@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I have to admit... I kinda get that sometimes. Maybe I'll spin up a new user just to test if that's it

[–] Carl@anarchist.nexus 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It can also mean that a mod removed the post. There was a dust-up in one of the self hosting communities a while back, when people were complaining about users deleting their “I’m having a weird issue with this setup, any tips” types of posts after getting answers. People were even talking about rules to ban repeat offenders.

Turns out, a mod was deleting the posts and citing a “must be about self hosting” rule to say that they should be posted in a tech support community instead. But since the mod wasn’t active 24/7, the posts were often deleted after they had already been answered.

The reason I remember it is because the whole thing ended with that mod throwing a tantrum, promoting some random users to mods with an “if it’s so easy to moderate, you fuckin do it then” message, and deleting their account.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

The reason I remember it is because the whole thing ended with that mod throwing a tantrum, promoting some random users to mods with an “if it’s so easy to moderate, you fuckin do it then” message, and deleting their account.

Can't say I'm surprised. The quality of moderation here is, how do I say this... a fictional concept? It's so easy to tell when someone is all "me want be important, me become internet dictator" and couldn't give less of a shit about doing it vaguely properly.

[–] antonim@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

But deleting your own post or comments is not permanent, you still have the 'undelete' option, right?

Edit: As I just checked below, deleting your comment results in 'deleted by creator', not 'permanently'.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Are you using an app or the web interface?

The reply below just shows "DELETED" on Connect, and I know from other posts that if a mod deletes them, it links to the modlog entry for the deletion (in Connect, I mean)

I am finding it interesting that what is displayed in the app is different than the web interface. Not sure why the text wouldn't be exactly the same.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't seem to mean that OP did it, because it doesn't look like that when I delete my own stuff?

[–] Dookieman12@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

Idk then. Maybe a mod deleted it? Maybe OP was banned? Maybe the poster's instance went defunct?

[–] anothermember@feddit.uk 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Narcissism maybe? It's infuriating and really dissuades me from contributing in-depth answers here, which is such a shame. If I'm responding to someone I'm not just responding to help the person, I want to help anyone who might be searching for an answer in the future. It seems like a real design flaw that the OP can unilaterally decide to (effectively) remove an entire topic on their whim when others have contributed more to it than they did.

[–] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Like how many old forms still help question I have. If we won't Lemmy to be legit then we must hold onto and archive old post.

[–] pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Some communities simply purge old posts.

[–] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Then they fucking stupid and we will never grow Lemmy as a legit site.

[–] BassTurd@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Some instances are hosted and paid for by people that don't have lots of money. Purging old posts to save costs is a valid reason to do so. Whether or not that's the case, I have no idea.

[–] pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago

It depends on a particular community.

Communities like nostupidquestions are not expected to have posts with important news or problems one might google a year later.

Tech-focused communities, on the contrary, are expected to keep posts forever, so that important information will be accessible. However, some people delete their posts after their problem is solved. This is highely discouraged.

And Lemmy ain't just one site. Yeah.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hm. Kind of a weird thing to be doing then. I know storage prices are up and all, but that half kilobyte of text?

[–] pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

One post is a couple of kilobytes, but there are hundreds of posts daily, you know. Also comments, also attachments. And no community exists in vacuum, they are parts of much larger instance servers. So this is among the least disruptive ways to save storage space.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sometimes mods delete the post too. Some mods are extremely anal about the rules and will end up deleting a ton of posts.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

If we (naively, I'm sure) assume they apply the rules as they're actually written, those make a lot of sense. If they're removing on rule 1 and 5 (no fake questions, especially for some agenda) then that's basically the exact same suspicion I have myself for most of this. But then the majority traffic is spam or even more malicious. hm.

[–] Malyca@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 days ago

Fear of political persecution maybe

[–] lennybird@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not, "No (such thing as) stupid questions"; it's "no stupid questions!"

/s

[–] amio@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That would explain it, because some of them really are pushing the suspension of disbelief. Which is why it's especially annoying when I go out of my way to assume whoever is not actually completely taking the piss or some other kind of idiot, and treat the question reasonably seriously. Despite what it looks like...

Deleting it afterwards makes me very suspicious indeed because, bluntly, many of the "questions" already felt... stupid... in the wrong goddamn ways. Not necessarily dumber shit, but differently dumb shit than people used to ask on reddit before LLMs, hint hint.

Seriously, have you read some of this shit?

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

When I've seen it, it tends to be because OP disagrees with the responses being drummed up by their post.

Last time I saw it, it was for a post about a trans couple being attacked, and somehow the comments became about one guy claiming he'd have saved the day as a gun owner (totally ignoring that he's not the only gun owner in America).

People backed him up, downvoting anyone saying it could have turned into a bloody shoot out, so OP deleted the comments.

Apparently people couldn't manage to support trans rights without being pro-guns, and if you disagreed the crowd turned on you. America, where trans people and guns have to go hand in bloody glove.

Controversial.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 4 points 2 days ago

I came across it on a post about why universities are expensive. At first it had all the standard Reddit answers but I used my experience in the university system to provide more accurate answers. My responses started generating responses and then the whole thing was shutdown. I thought they were farming for LLM content and didn’t like the answers. I am definitely less likely to participate now.

[–] Krusty@quokk.au -4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Well, you see, instead of having a single website run by a single fascist entity... on the fascistverse you have all kinds of fascists all across the rainbow of fascism on a myriad of distinct but unified yet elaborately disjointed architectures.