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.
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.
yo this isn’t the government.
You seem to be wanting a platform on which to conduct official, auditable conversations which are subject to accountability in the form of total mutual surveillance. For some reason pinning these hopes to a random project with a sewer rat for a mascot.
The internet has been going on for like 50 years now, people have been pulling all manner of flame war shenanigans and this has like never been a significant problem. Because if a conversation is being watched by a lot of people, there are always others who saw the original post who can corroborate the change. And if it isn’t, who the fuck cares? Like I said to OP, if you are getting into a lot of petty flame wars and feel you need this sort of thing, learn to take a screen shot or use some of the other many client side or 3rd party tools available just for this kind of suspicion. For the most part it is some kind of online urban legend tho. Plenty of people are saying all kinds of stupid bullshit online, no need for others to plot and plan to trick them into doing so. Whoever is looking to find stupid bullshit can find it without resorting to trickery, in any variety they choose.
Why would this be a bad thing? People should be responsible for what they say.
No, not always, and, even if they do, there is no guarantee that they would speak up – don’t forget that the majority of Lemmings are lurkers.
It’s really not – I have seen plenty of examples of it. I don’t have any links at hand, but the most recent example that I can think of is when Reddit made its API changes, and, out of protest, some Redditors edited all of their comments to either destroy the usefulness of the thread, or mislead. Whether this protest was justified, or not is a separate issue, but the fact of the matter remains that it is an issue.
I’m not saying Lemmy should be some kind of court room stenographer, I’m just saying it’s nice to see the original post when someone changes it substantially. This happens fairly often on Reddit, and it’s annoying trying to figure out what the responses were referring to unless they happened to quote it. This is especially true in political and news subreddits where someone says something unpopular and edits it, and sometimes that unpopular thing is interesting.
We have precedent here with publicly auditable mod logs, so why not public edit history? My edits are almost exclusively typos with the occasional link update or whatever, and I imagine that’s true for the vast majority of users, so I really don’t see an issue. We could implement it as a plugin if needed (all edits are federated, so it wouldn’t be that hard to build an instance that preserves history), so we should just make it a feature.
I don’t think that that would be a bad thing 😉
Yeah, I’ve had the same issue countless times. Although, it should be noted that a good chunk of those such examples that I have encountered were due to people deleting their comments, which would be out of the scope of this thread.
This is actually a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
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.