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.

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.

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.