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From what I understood of their comment on GitHub, it didn’t seem to be that they fundamentally disliked the idea of the feature, but more that they didn’t think that the community would find enough use from it to make its implementation worth it.
I don’t have any comment on phpBB specifically, but I do frequently encounter the issue on old Reddit posts; however, it should be noted that the majority of the types of changes to comments that reduce the usefuleness of a post thread is their deletion, which is out of the scope of this post.
If we prioritize discussion above all else, we’ll get more discussion, but the average quality will go down
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.
A lot of low quality discussion isn’t going to attract the type of users that made Reddit great
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 think better moderation tools is more important than comment and post edit history
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.
Sure, but then your comment chain doesn’t make sense, or if it’s a post them you lose all the comments.
I would assume that if there was information that is being redacted, then it would happen very early on in the posts creation – presumably before any comments are even made.
I disagree
How come? If you can censor the edit history, then you can’t trust the edit history. Perhaps something that could help was if the edit that was redacted should be replaced with an entry that states something like “This edit was redacted.”. In my opinion, this is inferior to having a persistent edit history, but perhaps it’s a potentially functional compromise.
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.
So that’s about 100GB/year of text? If so, then that is, indeed, a very large amount of text being generated.
The root shortcoming is that changing one letter gets the same flag as replacing the whole comment or adding a wall of text.
Fair point.
Over what period of time? What’s the current rate of increase?
Would you mind also defining what you meant by “huge”?
It’s not something I would care about or ever use.
I think it’s better to look at this not from the perspective of one’s own personal gain, but the benefit that it provides to the site on the whole.
It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out
Would you mind stating the exact “unresolved problems” that you are referring to?
it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.
I believe that the feature’s existence provides the passive benefit of increasing the average quality of posted content.
Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren’t willing to do the work, then it’s dead
What’s bothersome about that is that the dev didn’t just say that they didn’t want to work on it, they closed it. I completely understand if the dev doesn’t want to work on it personally, but closing it gives one the feeling that future discussion on the topic is not wanted – not to mention that it also greatly reduces its visibility.
opening a thread about it isn’t a helpful way of fixing that.
No, but I wanted to have more discussion that what was had on GitHub. I figured that posting about it here would yield a much larger audience, and, perhaps, less biased opinions.
It adds nothing to the discussion.
It wouldn’t technically add content (unless you count the peristant old versions as added content), it provides passive improvement to quality.
Also, I’m hosting my own instance (for others as well) and the (unoptimized) storage use is already huge.
What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?
No need to pay for something I don’t really care about.
Do note that, presumably, were this feature to be implemented, it would likely be able to be disabled on the side of the instance – meaning that your instance wouldn’t store any of the edits itself.
I actually don’t think it is required to trust people on a forum in the way you suggest.
Why not try to improve it though?
If I was in what I perceived to be a really high stakes discussion (read: flamewar) where I was worried about this, I would take my own measures to ensure I could “trust” the other parties. I would save my own copies locally. Reddit RES had a button you could add client side for just this kind of petty bullshit. If you really want the feature, implement it in your browser/device.
I don’t really understand the argument hat you are trying to make. You are admitting that this concern is justified, and that there are scenarious where one could be expected to want to take such measures, but you don’t want a feature for this built in. Instead, you’d want a 3rd party plug-in…? I must ask: Why? Also, TIL about Reddit RES. Neat.
If someone is going to such lengths as to edit their post so it looks like you are responding to something else to make you look bad, it is either: a) a boring joke, or b) they are really pathetic and sad trying to sabotage you. Either way, it’s not the end of the world. If it sticks in your craw, you can just go edit your comment to say “edit: the comment to which I am replied was substantially edited after I posted so what I said no longer applies”. You can either delete what you said, or correct it, or leave it as-is with a caveat.
The point that I am trying to make isn’t that this is for my own benefit, it is that this sort of behaviour detracts from the quality, and usefulness of the information on this site on the whole. Information shouldn’t be purely ephemeral. The reliable exchange of information on forums is invaluable in the modern age. I couldn’t even hope to count the number of times that I have gone through old forum posts reading people’s opinions, and conversations when conducting research on a topic, or troubleshooting an issue.
I’m not saying Lemmy should be some kind of court room stenographer
I don’t think that that would be a bad thing 😉
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
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.
We have precedent here with publicly auditable mod logs, so why not public edit history?
This is actually a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
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.
Why would this be a bad thing? People should be responsible for what they say.
there are always others who saw the original post who can corroborate the change
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.
For the most part it is some kind of online urban legend tho
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.
Wikipedia is aggressively compressed (since you can merge multiple article revisions together and build a decent dictionary to drop the size dramatically).
The example that I provided is uncompressed. Here is a notable excerpt from Wikipedia:
As of May 2015, the current version of the English Wikipedia article / template / redirect text was about 51 GB uncompressed in XML format.
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.
Being able to go back and fix my comment or add to it, change hyperlinks, etc, is great. Knowing conversations might get derailed to fixate on why I changed something etc is not great.
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.
It’s not just about editing out passwords or hiding what is already out there in the federation. Public internet, no taksies-backsies is beyond the point.
However, that seems to be the common counterargument in this comment section.
It’s about facilitating good communication.
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.
I’d imagine the nitpicking and derailing will be more prevalent that any other use of the feature.
This is conjecture.
Why do you need to “verify” what a user changed?
This was already outlined in my post. People can change their post’s content through an edit to mislead the reader.
Chilling impact / chilling effect is just a technical term for things that inhibit or discourage behaviours.
Oh, my mistake! Was this the idea that you were intending to convey?
It can take only one or two negative interactions to shut a user up and revert them to lurking. Lemmy needs people talking.
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.
99% of users won’t use the feature
Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.
This is a good point – I missed that.
invites users to review people’s edit history
They already do this with comment history.
What do you mean by this? You can’t see comment history currently.
If you don’t want people digging in to your edit history, don’t make controversial edits.
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.
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).
This is a fair point.
I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to “socialize.”
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.
What you think adds a feature actually takes away a feature (being able to edit posts without the edit being visible). That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Do note that a feature’s mere existence doesn’t necessitate that it must be a good feature.
Increased hosting costs to operate it (storage)
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.
Increased API calls and sizes (bandwidth)
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.
99.999% of feature use is just typo correction
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.
99% of users won’t use the feature
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.
It invites users to review people’s edit history and nitpick/call out things that the poster edited out for a reason…
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.
Which in turn breaks down and chills conversation as users have to be overly careful that their comment or post is 100% accurate to avoid getting nitpicked, that they fully agree with what they’re saying as they can’t take it back or edit their stance/opinion in the future, that they don’t reveal anything sensitive by mistake
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.
It invites abuse from mods by reverting edits and dictating which “version of truth” of a post is the one that everyone sees rather than the user being in control.
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.
Extra UI cutter is needed to handle the feature
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.
If a user posts credentials, they have to delete the entire post or comment and even then, the backend server very well could still have that log saved in a backup (legal ramifications)
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.
Users could abuse the feature to e.g. share links to abuse material and hide it in the log requiring moderators to have to review all messages and all edit histories, greatly increasing their work load, especially if users constantly edit their posts to make moderators jobs harder to sift through all the edits to reveal what they did.
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.
will have a direct, chilling impact on all other users.
Aha, you don’t need to use such melodramatic language to try to magnify your opinion – your counterarguments should be enough.
if you need audit logs, you do it behind the scenes not in the UI
Do note that this is supposed to be for the benefit of the user, and not the admins. A user cannot access logs.
Visible changelogs on information chat / social systems make people talk less, not more.
I would like to know your source for such a statement.
And given how Lemmy is still in its infancy and hasn’t reached a critical mass, adding a feature like OP proposed could make Lemmy a far less inviting place to socialise.
This is a purely subjective statement, I would argue.
This one actually isn’t so bad. If a person opts out of their edit history being shown, at least this would be a sort of red flag for the reader that should trigger skepticism in the content’s trustworthiness. That being said, it would still be inferior to having a mandatory edit history.
Editing a post may be to remove the password or email address you accidentally copy pasted in, or removing some potentially doxxing information, or one of many reasons you want that content gone.
Why not just delete the post, and then make a new one with the correct information?
Github has edit history, but it also allows users to delete revisions so it seems your main concern would not be resolved by this implementation.
If this were to be allowed, the edit history would then be pointless.
And as you point out, there is already a message that says the post was edited and what time.
That is the only information that is provided. One is unable to find out what was changed.
Hm, that’s actually a very good counterexample. I hadn’t considered that.