In the last few weeks, I frequently see some empty comments. It’s just the username and no text beneath.

Is there a deeper reason behind this? Do people nowadays strip away the text instead of deleting a comment? Or did some script surface that ‘makes the internet forget’? First I thought people did this before deleting a comment and the deletion just didn’t get federated. But I scrolled through some older posts and they also still have comments like that, so that can’t be it. Right?

Can anyone educate me?

  • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    If I delete my post/comment, I first edit it to be blank because it can take way more time to actually delete the post/comment than just editing it. They’ll appear as just a completely blank post (not even any unicode spaces or weird shit like that). I started doing this after seeing other users doing the same for the reason I mentioned.

    • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 days ago

      I usually replace it with a period to try to make it easier to differentiate from posts that were only an image that didn’t load

        • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
          0·
          5 days ago

          I’m using sync and if an image post doesn’t load i see an error, but if a comment with just an image doesn’t load it just looks like a blank comment. I’ve checked the site a few times and usually the image loads on the site, or if you touch the blank post where an image would be and sometimes that gets it to show up.