I believe that the addition of an edit history would be a massive boon to the usefulness of Lemmy on the whole. A common problem with forums is the relatively low level of trust that users can have in another’s content. When one has the ability to edit their posts, and comments this invites the possibility of misleading the reader – for example, one can create a comment, then, after gaining likes, and comments, reword the comment to either destroy the usefulness of the thread on the whole, or mislead a future reader. The addition of an edit history would solve this issue.
Lemmy already tracks that a post was edited (I point your attention to the little pencil icon that you see in a posts header in the browser version of the lemmy-ui). What I am describing is the expansion of this feature. The format that I have envisioned is something very similar to what Element does. For example:
What this image is depicting is a visual of what parts of the post were changed at the time that it was edited, and a complete history of every edit made to the post – sort of like a “git diff”.
I would love to hear the feedback of all Lemmings on this idea for a feature – concerns, suggestions, praise, criticisms, or anything else!
This post is the result of the current (2023-10-03T07:37Z) status of this GitHub post. It was closed by a maintainer/dev of the Lemmy repo. I personally don’t think that the issue got enough attention, or input, so I am posting it here in an attempt to open it up to a potentially wider audience.
Should be minimal since it’s text. In fact, a lot of my edits reduce posts since I use it to add an edit that I would’ve needed to post in multiple sub-threads.
Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.
They already do this with comment history. If you don’t want people digging in to your edit history, don’t make controversial edits.
People being jerks for calling out typo fixes likely will result in downvotes, thus discouraged by the community. Look at grammar police, they’re frequently downvoted to the point where they’re not very common (though more common than they should be).
First, that remains to be seen. You yourself said 99% of people won’t use the feature, and I think it’ll turn out much like the grammar police, people calling out others for small mistakes will be shunned. I could even see mods making and enforcing harassment rules related to behavior like that.
Second, if it improves the quality of comments and posts, I don’t see that as a bad thing. Perhaps individual communities could disable it, but it should absolutely be enabled for serious communities that cover politics and news.
Then don’t give them that power. Just allow them to lock posts and leave a note or a flag to warn users of abuse by the commenter.
Not necessarily. You can pick a client that doesn’t implement the feature. Or you can have it be an optional feature, or hide it by default in an expandable menu. It doesn’t cause clutter in Wikipedia, so it’s not inherently a poor UX choice.
We can bike shed the UX once we agree on the functional requirements, that’s how the design process is intended to work.
This is a federated platform, you should assume everything you post is there for good on some instance.
Sure, but they can do it anyway in the clear by sending DMs, changing text of links to look innocent, etc.
I think there should be an option to show edits always, which would catch this issue. So basically you’d be looking at the equivalent of inline git diff (with strikeouts or whatever to show deleted content). That’s how I’d prefer to navigate Lemmy, and I’m guessing enough others would as well to catch any attempted abuse.
Then I guess you and I see the platform very differently. I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to “socialize.” It’s a link aggregator, so I expect the bulk of the discussion to be about the content of links.
That said, there are plenty of casual communities that work more like forums that want to foster casual discussion, not serious discussion. For those, edit history should probably be disabled. So make it an opt-in thing by community so those of us that want it can have it.
This is a good point – I missed that.
What do you mean by this? You can’t see comment history currently.
Hm, well, an edit is only controversial if you know that it was edited in a controversial manner. You wouldn’t look in the edit history because you knew that it was controversial, you would look in the edit history and find that it was controversial. Unless, you meant to say “controversial posts” to which I would say that I disagree with that opinion.
This is a fair point.
This is a rather one-sided/dubious statement. For one talking about news and politics could be deemed as socializing, plus a forum is just a medium of discourse in the general sense – it doesn’t really have any explicitly defined topic unless stated by an individual communtiy.
I mean user comments on other posts. I can see every comment someone made on lemmy just like I can on Reddit. I see a lot of cases where people do ad hominem attacks based on something someone said in another context (e.g. you post in community X therefore your opinion is invalid).
And yeah, I’m ok with super casual conversations, but we shouldn’t design features with only that in mind. Serious conversations benefit a lot more from editing comments, especially if they end up getting linked elsewhere, and if a popular comment gets edited in a sketchy way (e.g. it’s a support thread with an organization), that could have very real implications.
That is a nonsense. If no people use the feature but it’s there, it still costs you the storage of every edit anyone ever made.
It depends what was exactly meant by the original comment. If it was that 99% of users wont edit their comments, then yes it won’t add much extra hosting cost, but if was that 99% of people won’t access it, then you are right in that it makes no difference.