I have noticed this is occuring more and more. It is a problem that started to crop up on reddit but now I’m seeing here more often. Do you not want other people to benefit from the answers you received? This community is kind of pointless if you just get an answer and wipe it from the web.
Yeah, this has always bugged me too. It slows down our accumulation of old content, which is one of the big draws of platforms like this. People love to go to reddit for answers to questions originally asked years ago, and they could potentially use Lemmy for that too, if our backstock got substantial enough. As a much smaller userbase, though, we kinda need every thread we can get.
And I’ve already had this happen a few times. The search engine I use (Kagi) tends to rank fediverse platforms higher when they have a good answer, though it’s rare they ever have something relevant.
But I’ve gone to multiple posts on lemmy where the content was straight up gone, or where the main post was available, but the comment(s) that provided an actual answer were deleted.
I will say, you’ll see a lot of users on lemm.ee who deleted their content, because lemm.ee shut down, and there’s no way to retroactively delete your content after the fact once the instance is no longer being hosted, so I know a lot of people didn’t want to leave any kind of permanent digital trail of their account data and just deleted the whole thing.
Hell, even I did with my lemm.ee account before it was shut down, but I hadn’t really answered many questions there that would be useful to most people. It was a lot more political debate than helpful commentary.