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.
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.