Request/PSA: Please do not delete your post/thread after your question has been answered!

Hello!

If you have a question, make a thread, and then get a bunch of responses, answers, discussions happen back and forth, information is shared, and so on, please do not delete that thread after you’ve found your answer. It’s rude! And here’s why:

Doing that makes the discussion invisible, de-indexes it from various search functions (the reddit search function, google, bing, and so on), and then those answers you found, that were so helpful to you, become invisible to others that don’t create their own threads when they have questions, and rely instead on searching for the threads/questions/answers of others. It also encourages duplicate threads on the same subject matter, and typically the re-hash of something that was just discussed a day or a week ago isn’t going to be as in depth as it was when originally discussed.

A recent example was “realistic to buy a <price point> home with X% down?” Between the hundreds of upvotes, the top voted response having >300 upvotes, and the literal thousands of replies and comments below (the thread was popping with lively discussion all weekend), it’s abundantly clear that OP probably had more “answer” and 3rd party opinions than they wanted, and good for OP, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t gems and words of wisdom in there that someone else might benefit from, probably LOTS of other people in fact. But now that thread is invisible to google, invisible to the search function of others that may have similar questions, but that aren’t the thread-creating types, the only place you can find it is in your post history if you’d already read the thread, not super useful to others!

If your motive to delete the thread is that you’re ‘done’ with it and you don’t want any more notifications (in the previous example, that person probably felt quite spammed by notifications!), then open your own thread (which you will be able to find very easily, thanks to the notifications you just got, that you’re sick of getting), click the triple dot button thingie (bottom right corner of your original post), and uncheck “send me reply notifications.” It’s exactly the same amount of work to do that as it is to delete the thread entirely, but in this way you aren’t removing that collection of answers/knowledge/discussions/etc from everyone else being able to see it.