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.
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How much extra storage and bandwidth would it use? It’s just text. It’s clear that you don’t like the idea, but I don’t find your reasons convincing.
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Well, I was of the other opinion, but you have decisively convinced me, thank you.
Thoughts on the cons of making all upvotes visible to all users? I’ve always felt that would be a net benefit, but now I’m not so sure. Any idea?
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.
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 @[email protected], 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.