I had a thought recently about how it would be nice to have a sort of “git diff” style edit history for posts and comments. This would elimintate the need for the classic reddit style of “Edit: Spelling”. It would also prevent people from completely changing the topic of a post or a comment in the future, thereby nullifying all associated comments and backlinks.

Of course this idea is not new; it has been created as an issue on GitHub aprroximately 2 years ago. The issue has since been closed with the opinion along the lines of “people make edits to hide something that they don’t want to be seen by the public”.

I’m curious what the current sentiment is of the current userbase of Lemmy regarding this issue. Perhaps over 2 years sentiment has changed? I would love to hear any and all arguments for, and against this feature

  • @fuboEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    People make edits for lots of reasons. Anyone claiming that people only make edits for only one reason is wrong, no matter what one reason they claim.

    1. Spelling & grammar.
    2. Corrections someone brought up further down the thread (see below)
    3. Adding links or correcting URLs of links, especially when parentheses are involved.
    4. Adding details that you didn’t think of earlier.
    5. Rephrasing something after realizing it was unintentionally offensive.
    6. Rephrasing something after realizing it was just plain rude.
    7. Redacting the entire comment in protest.
    8. Rephrasing something after realizing that it was the sort of rambling and vaguely incoherent long & convoluted sentence that readers are likely to eventually get tired of reading, because it’s really just that obnoxious even if people used to write like this all the time in the 18th century or earlier eras of literary compositional history.
    9. Spelling & grammar. Fixing markup!
    10. Removing duplicate redundancy that says the same thing twice and should be deduplicated.