Deletion Trend Report?

February 14, 2025 3:23 PM

With all the talk about deletions - justified, unjustified, excessive, etc. - it might be useful to see some kind of data or reporting on deletions. Are the amount of deletions up over the past few years (certainly seem so)? What kinds of comments are being deleted and what are the reasons for deletion? It might be useful to get some broader sense from the community about whether or not the increased deletions are improving people's experiences as an asker, reader, commenter.
posted by brookeb to MetaFilter-Related at 3:23 PM (11 comments total)

Loup pulled 4 years of data on post deletions back in December. A key point to remember in this is that requests for full account wipes (and thus post deletions) are included in this data and as far as I recall from the conversation at the time, they have no way to distinguish one from another.
posted by phunniemee at 3:40 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Mod note: I pulled the account wipe data from 2024, so there's that.

Per loup's data pull, deletion percentages have decreased, but it's tough to see what that means. Mods are leaving more notes when deleting things (per community requests), so that may make it seem like more deletions are occurring.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 4:52 PM on February 14

I still would like to know if the deletion count were actual deletions or if, like the log, frimble pulled deletion notes for the stat. Apologies if this was ever answered, if so I did not find it.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:55 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

Which deletion count are you referring to, the data that loup pulled or what I pulled?
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 4:58 PM on February 14

The data that loup pulled; I think account wipe data is not deletion data and it's pretty clear what the metric is.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:59 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

ok, thanks for clarifying, i've tagge loup about this in the mod slack, but they're off until Monday evening, so probably won't hear back until then.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:08 PM on February 14

Sure, no problem. Thanks for asking.

I remembered why I gave up -

Another note on the data: It's NOT useful for tracking trends in deletions, because it includes account wipes.

Someone who posted a ton in 2020, but was not deleted at the time, but who quit and asked for an account wipe in 2024, would be represented (if I understand the stats right) as having had their comments deleted in 2020 on the chart loup provided.

So basically...there is no way to compare over time. At least, I gave up last time.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:10 PM on February 14 [6 favorites]

Although if it's deletion NOTES that would actually be a better trend line - but wouldn't tell you how many deletions. I will stop posting now. :)
posted by warriorqueen at 5:11 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Although if it's deletion NOTES that would actually be a better trend line - but wouldn't tell you how many deletions.

It should, of course, because mods should never be deleting a comment without leaving a fucking note.
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:25 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

Another note on the data: It's NOT useful for tracking trends in deletions, because it includes account wipes.

It would probably be a good idea for the new site to have a deletion type column (with values moderation, user request, account wipe) so we can have some real data on this question, since there has been a lot of friction about trends in moderation but we have no hard data to look at.
posted by ssg at 11:45 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

Surely someone knows which accounts were wiped? if so, it shouldn't be that hard to separate comments deleted due to wipes from comments deleted by moderators? It's the sort of thing I could do with a bunch of manual sorting and fiddling around with badly-structured formulae using Excel in maybe 30 minutes.

Even if we don't know which accounts were wiped, we could get close to the numbers by excluding any comments where the user's profile page no longer exists or something?
posted by dg at 3:10 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]