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.
Do note that a feature’s mere existence doesn’t necessitate that it must be a good feature.
I don’t believe that this is much of an issue, as text is extremely cheap to store. It would, of course, be false to state that it doesn’t increase the cost at all, but I would argue that the increase in cost is most likely small enough to be of little concern. Let’s make a very basic, and not overly precise example: Say, on average, there is 100 words in each Lemmy post’s body. And say, on average, that a user will edit 10 words. Now, say that the algorithm that generates the changes, only stores the changes relative to the previous content, so we can then simplify this to say that it only stores the text plus, say, maybe 1 extra words worth of data for location, and linking information. So that means that each post will only add on maybe 11 words on average which would equate to a 1.1% increase in text storage requirements. Given that all of Wikipedia’s Engish article text is around 20GB, a 1.1% increase in that is only about 220MB – one should be able to see that the equivelant for Lemmy wouldn’t be that terrible.
I’m not sure that I am qualified enough to make a comment on this, as I am not at all an expert in how Lemmy’s (or ActivityPub’s) Networking works under the hood, but how would this differ from how it already works? You can already make an edit, so the number of API requests should stay somewhat the same. The only thing I can think of is that when someone opens the edit history, they would need to make a few API calls to retrieve it all, unless all that could be retrieved in one call, then it should be the same as displaying the date of the last edit which is a feature that already exists with the only difference being the payload size in that case.
Sure, but I don’t see this as a counterargument. The whole point of it is to be able to verify that it is indeed a typo correction.
True, this could be seen as an investment that may not be worth it as it would really only cater to those who are, perhaps, on the upper end of paranoia, or overly persnickety.
This is a fair point. I hadn’t considered this. I do think that it wouldn’t be super common, it is indeed a possible issue.
I mean, it’s kind of already like this, is it not? What you say is certainly under scrutiny by the court of public opinion. Unless you mean that one cannot take something back because it would be ingrained in the edit history, but, to that, I would say that one can still delete their post.
Hm, I think this is a completely separate issue. A mod, or admin should not be able to do such things. This actually brings up a separate idea that I had where, ideally, a post would be signed by the user who wrote it so that one could be certain that it was the user who indeed wrote the post, and that it was not modified by an admin, or some other external entity. This censorship is an existing problem with no solution.
The button that would contain the history already exists in the form of the edit pencil that posts have. Unless you mean the diff itself, but that would only be visible if one toggles it.
Yeah deleting would be the only option – personally, I don’t see this as a huge issue, but that’s just me. As for the logs, they could already exist for a deleted post anyways. When you post something online, there really is 0 guarantee that you can ever remove it. Generally, one must accept that whatever they put online is out there, in some capacity, forever.
Good point. I hadn’t considered this issue. I would argue that it’s the most important point of your list. I’m not sure that there is anything that could really be done about it. It would essentially have to rely on someone reporting it after having gone through the edit history, or a mod just happening to have gone through the history themself.
Aha, you don’t need to use such melodramatic language to try to magnify your opinion – your counterarguments should be enough.
Do note that this is supposed to be for the benefit of the user, and not the admins. A user cannot access logs.
I would like to know your source for such a statement.
This is a purely subjective statement, I would argue.
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The example that I provided is uncompressed. Here is a notable excerpt from Wikipedia:
Since I am only talking about the article content, and not any of the extra structure, or linking data, then it should be straightforward to imagine that it is only ~20GB in size.
As was pointed out by @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works, this may be self-limiting issue, since this sort of behavior would be quickly condemned by the court of public opinion.
However, that seems to be the common counterargument in this comment section.
Correct, but this is a subjective argument. I am of the opinion that it would improve communication by improving the quality of the post (removing things like “EDIT Grammar”, etc.), and improving one’s trustworthiness in the post’s content.
This is conjecture.
This was already outlined in my post. People can change their post’s content through an edit to mislead the reader.
Oh, my mistake! Was this the idea that you were intending to convey?
I would honestly argue that the lemmings, themselves, accomplish this already to a far greater degree 😉 – although that could be due to the influx of redditors, I’m not sure.
Since you tagged me, I figured I’d drop a note here. I agree with pretty much everything you posted here, I just wanted to add my input to one point.
I disagree on this. I lurked for years on Reddit because I was enjoying reading the discussion, which was generally high quality. I only started posting when I felt I had something to add to the conversation. I’ve seen tons of cases where Redditors said something like “this is my first post, but I’ve been lurking for years; I just wanted to add…”
If we prioritize discussion above all else, we’ll get more discussion, but the average quality will go down. A lot of low quality discussion isn’t going to attract the type of users that made Reddit great, and I think we want to attract those users because we need some reason for people to prefer lemmy to other options.
I have bailed on several communities just because of the quality of discussion, here, on Reddit, and on various forums. I’m not going to put in the effort if it’s not going to be reciprocated, and I imagine a lot of others feel similarly.
If comment and post edit history is what we need to encourage higher quality discussion, I’m completely in favor. We can enforce anti-harassment rules through moderation, but we can’t enforce any kind of post quality and expect it to work, so we should be looking to create a culture of higher effort posts, at least in select communities.
I think better moderation tools is more important than comment and post edit history, but I believe both are important.
Not necessarily. One must look at the underlying reason(s) for why people aren’t contributing to discussions. If it is indeed that they have nothing of quality to input, and are then incentivized to do so, then, yes, that will cause a reduction in discussion quality. But what if, instead, users capable of producing high quality content aren’t contributing because they don’t feel that their opinion is welcome in the discussion – that they are afraid of being harassed, or ostracized? If these users begin to contribute more, then the quality would theoretically increase. Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily be that simple in practice, but I would assume that it would have a different effect than the former example.
I am hesitant to agree that Reddit was consistently producing only high quality content 😜 I would argue that the more likely explanation is that there was a flat increase in volume of content being posted, and the people sorting by new had statistically more good content to choose from. Unless, of course, this is what you are referring to.
I strongly agree. Not because I personally have any use for better moderation tools, but that appears to be a major, and most likely primary complaint that many people have when they come to Lemmy from other platforms like Reddit.
Everyone is looking for something different, so we’ll all have a different idea of what “quality content” looks like. I’ll try to expound on mine with some examples.
When I first used Reddit, /r/news and /r/politics had a pretty diverse set of users, with pretty frequent sources to back up claims. As they got more popular, the prevailing leftist userbase essentially took over the subreddit and their posts got upvoted far more than other view points, and upvotes were more readily awarded to popular opinions than arguments with clear citations. A few years ago, I bailed on both and joined /r/neutral_politics and /r/neutral_news, which are strictly moderated subs where comments are required to source any facts. My experience there was way better and divergent views were more visible because the lower effort nonsense without any evidence was moderated out. Not only was there less low quality content, but there was also more high quality content because users were rewarded for higher effort contributions with discussion.
I’ve had a similar experience on other subreddits as well. I’m willing to put in the effort to have a higher engagement discussion, but I’m not going to do that if others don’t want that discussion.
I think tools like publicly visible edit history help keep people honest in discussions like that. It helps on Wikipedia to catch vandalism, and I’d like to try the same for something like Reddit.
However, this type of feature makes no sense on meme communities and other areas where lower effort contributions are expected and welcomed.