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.
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. 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.
And as you point out, there is already a message that says the post was edited and what time.
Overall I don’t see that the benefits outweigh the new issues caused.
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Sure, this is true for any public website. But at least editing it out is a form of damage control. Being able to edit and federate the change to most servers makes the problem a lot smaller.
If edit history existed and you couldn’t remove an entry, the only damage control would be to delete. This is also acceptable but I haven’t seen a good argument for keeping the history yet.
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It should, deleting on Lemmy edits the content to something like “removed”, so it should federate
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Not that long ago deleting accounts would crash servers, and admins would have to kill the process. I’m not sure if account deletion is federating now, but deleting an individual post or comment should federate.
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You could make it so there is a checkbox for deleting the edit history, so only the fact that it has been edited remains.
OP’s argument is that people can hide that they have edited. While I’m not against the suggestion, it wouldn’t solve the original problem.
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.
Why not just delete the post, and then make a new one with the correct information?
Sure, but then your comment chain doesn’t make sense, or if it’s a post them you lose all the comments.
If this were to be allowed, the edit history would then be pointless.
I disagree, but I do think it invalidates your reason for having an edit history.
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.
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.
It could be as simple as updating a post with an outcome. You paste in a link and don’t realise until too late that you actually pasted in your personal email address. Do you then have to delete the whole thread and all it’s 1000 comments?
How come?
An edit history is helpful for more than just an audit history. Most histories won’t be removed, and you can see what has changed. Not to see if someone is gaslighting you, but just to see changes that no one is trying to hide.
It could be as simple as updating a post with an outcome. You paste in a link and don’t realise until too late that you actually pasted in your personal email address. Do you then have to delete the whole thread and all it’s 1000 comments?
Hm, that’s actually a very good counterexample. I hadn’t considered that.
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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?
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.
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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.
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.
Lemmy needs people talking
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.
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.
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.
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increased hosting costs
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.
99% of users won’t use the feature
Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.
invites users to review people’s edit history
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).
be overly careful that their comment or post is 100% accurate
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.
abuse by mods by reverting edits
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.
Extra UI clutter
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.
If a user posts credentials
This is a federated platform, you should assume everything you post is there for good on some instance.
Users could abuse the feature
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.
less inviting place to socialise
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.
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.
comment history
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.
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.
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.
Nah, never liked the feature, wouldn’t appreciate it here.
Side note, external images can be embedded in markdown like this:
Nah, never liked the feature, wouldn’t appreciate it here.
Would you mind elaborating on why you feel that way?
Side note, external images can be embedded in markdown like this:
Thank you for that info! I’ll update my post.
It adds nothing to the discussion. Use cases where it would have been useful I can count with my fingers. I made many more edits due to typos and brain-farts (that made the sentence look like I just learned English yesterday) than that.
Edit: Also, I’m hosting my own instance (for others as well) and the (unoptimized) storage use is already huge. No need to pay for something I don’t really care about.
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.
What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?
All of what I had in mind is database, media I have in a separate and cheaper storage.
Would you mind also defining what you meant by “huge”?
~28 GB.
Over what period of time? What’s the current rate of increase?
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Personally I like the idea of that history simply because I have seen people go back and edit their posts, as a form of trolling by getting into an argument with someone, and then changing their posts to completely obfuscate what the argument was about
It’s not something I would care about or ever use. It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out, and it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.
Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren’t willing to do the work, then it’s dead, and opening a thread about it isn’t a helpful way of fixing that.
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.
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.
This is the part where you should recognize that its not a feature they want on lemmy. It doesn’t need “more visability”, it’s their project, and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We just use it as a byproduct of it being free and open.
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.
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Your are absolutely right. I guess I had accidentally copied the wrong link. Thank you for letting me know! I have now updated my post.
I really appreciated reddit’s ninja-edit window, where you had about three minutes to fix typos and grammatical errors without getting the this-was-edited indicator.
The root shortcoming is that changing one letter gets the same flag as replacing the whole comment or adding a wall of text.
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.
