Thunder has an option to dim read posts.

That’s because, currently, the community stats that you see in the sidebar are only from your instance – community stats are currently not federated. Afaik, federated community stats are going to be implemented in 0.19.

and see people upvote their own comment.

Upvoting one’s own comment is default behaviour on Lemmy. When a user makes a post, or comment on Lemmy, it gets automatically upvoted by that user.

It matters because American culture currently prefers everyone to have a college degree as opposed to any other type of education. […] If this avenue was cut off then the attitude of the public would change to allow other means of education.

I completely agree that our favoring of, or requiring of post-secondary degrees for employement is an important cultural issue. I don’t agree, however, that the solution is to make the provision of loans illegal – illegalization is rarely anything else than a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. An argument could be made that the government provision of student loans should be stopped (in countries where that occurs e.g. Canada), but I don’t think the solution is to simply make all student loans illegal.

and then yoke them into debt for the rest of their lives.

Hm, that is an assumption. There’s a few issues with that statement. The total cost of one’s loans are directly related to the cost of the post-secondary institution that they decide to attend. There is little reason to go to a very expensive institution. I do understand that some employers are elitist in that they won’t hire anybody outside of an ivy league school, but I would wager that that issue is not very prevalent – the free market should take up the slack. Furthermore, one’s ability to get out of such debt is related to the income that they expect from employment after attaining their degree, as well as their level of monetary responsibility, and savviness. If one decides to blindly go into student debt for studies that will offer little in return, that is one’s own risk to take. You must also not forget that there is no requirement that one must do white-collar work. Trades do not require such degrees, and are just as well-paying, if not better.

I presume that anywhere where interest-free loans are offered, they are offered by that country’s government. Canada, for example, as of April 1st 2023, offers federal student loans interest-free. Depending on the province, some may not have interest on provincial loans, as well.

What issue are you looking to solve? You state that you believe people are able to seek out, and attain their education independently through resources like the internet. So why would it matter if there are alternatives that cost money which one can pay, and receive loans for?

What is the context behind this post?

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.

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.

Borg good

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.