12
votes
How about a "view edit history" for posts?
I feel like this would be good for transparency. It's a feature Facebook used to have and then took away— but I think something that either shows each edit's version in a timeline, or a diff, or just a "first and final revision" comparison would be nice.
I'd prefer the first suggestion (a chronological version history), but any form of viewing a comment's history would be really appreciated!
The problem with this idea is that while transparency is important (and I am a huge advocate of it when it comes to auditing trusted user actions), IMO it also needs to be balanced against user privacy and giving them control of their data, which the GDPR further emphasizes and legally enforces. Another major problem is that if someone needed to remove sensitive, personal or any other information they do not wish to be public that they accidentally included or that someone else did and they compelled/demanded to have removed, an edit history would make that impossible without admin intervention, which doesn't scale effectively.
Overall, comment edit history (whether whole or in part) is incredibly problematic both ethically and legally, and for all those problems what does it really gain you by having it? Being able to detect the occasional bit of trolling and argument altering edits just isn't worth it, IMO.
This is a really important rebuttal. I’ve been trying to think of a good response, or solution, but am kind of at a loss. Ultimately, while I do think transparency is important, I do concede that nothing of real value is gained.
I suppose one counter-idea could be to add the ability to “edit and delete history” but then we return to the balance of transparency and user privacy, since a user may not see or understand that.
Thanks for the thoughtful checkmate!
Heh, well speaking of transparency, I initially suggested something similar to what you just did a long time ago when we were all first theory-crafting features and what I wrote in rebuttal just now was largely @deimos' argument against it, which convinced me it wasn't a great idea.
The only alternatives I could come up with were making it entirely opt-in, but the likelihood of anyone actually opting in would be slim to none, and the other was to perhaps simply to do an edit heatmap of sorts with timestamps, where the specific text edits themselves aren't shown but merely the amount, position and timing of edits. But ultimately neither would probably be all that useful in the end so probably not worth the development time to implement.
I think the alternative would be to have the possibility to both edit a post (preserving history) or delete it (thereby making the post and its history un-viewable, except perhaps to the site admins). Tildes already has both of those options already available, just sans the ability to view history for the posts.
This way, those who really wish to remove something sensitive would be able to do so, and transparency is still preserved for other posts. It's not a 100% perfect solution (you will rarely get situations where discussion-useful data is lost through post deletion, though in my experience that is quite rare), but I think it's a reasonable compromise.
Another completely separate thing to keep in mind is that once Tildes becomes publicly viewable all comments will probably end up being archived by various bots/crawlers anyway, so someone who's really dedicated will probably have a way of finding out what was in the original edit of a post anyway.
Sure, but again, what are you really gaining by having edit history? In 99.9% of cases it will likely just be people fixing spelling/grammar mistakes, clarifying statements and adding some more relevant points to their arguments so why bother tracking all that useless data when one of Tildes stated goals is to treat user data as a dangerous byproduct, not an asset. Transparency just for transparency's sake isn't valuable IMO, especially when it comes with more drawbacks than it does benefits like edit history does.
One of the things that is being discussed to potentially counteract that very problem is making the publicly viewable site show an anonymous version of the comment sections by assigning each user a pseudo-randomly generated name rather than their real username. This pseudo-random name would be consistent across the comment section of a topic so back and forth replies could be followed but it would prevent webcrawlers and caching/archive services from tying a comment to the account that made it. And any undelete service that pops up specifically for Tildes that scrapes the site while logged in could simply be blacklisted on the site and mentions of it potentially a bannable offense.
I'm sure the GDPR complicates this, but I view this in a very black and white way - Once you click "Submit", "Post", or whatever the confirmation button is, it's out there for all to see, and it's too late to take it back.
This is a big problem with Reddit. You can over-write a comment, then delete it, and unreddit will still show the original comment.
There was a person on Reddit posting in my city's subreddit about porch thieves. They made someone mad, so the person PMed them their address thinking it would get them to back off or whatever.. The person they PMed went into their public thread and published a lot of public info on the person who PMed them. Thing is, they had no idea if the info they published was right. Could have had the wrong person. And anyone reading the history would assume they did have the wrong person because this guy was making things suspiciously obvious and getting caught in things on purpose. Writing something and then waiting 20 minutes to edit before the other guy saw. Which gave them plenty of time to get the original comment then the comment that was meant to look like a cover up comment..
That personal info was up in that thread all day. From morning until the very end of the work day for all to see, and all signs pointed to him having the wrong guy, but the person he thought he had nailed kept adding to the fire sort of framing the person in the public info..
Admins were contacted several times. Took about 10 hours to get it down.
I don't like the idea of an edit or deleted post history. People should get to wipe what they want permanently here. It is a major selling point. If someone is abusing it, then obviously something should be done.
If I edit something to further clarify, I try and strike out the original, and lay it out a bit more clear to be transparent. But I know once deimos gets the pagination up and we can see all of our history, I'll delete some info I posted that gives clues about me personally.
I personally tend towards preferring public, immutable, transparently edit-logged systems, but the various realities of dealing with personal information and legal issues makes that difficult to implement in a practical manner, and I agree that a full edit log probably isn't a great fit for Tildes.
However, I think some of the value of that log can be obtained in a different manner. Most of the time when I see an edit marker, I really just want to know if there's been substantial changes to the content or just minor proofreading fixes. Users are usually polite enough to leave a note for larger changes, but this is not enforced and people sometimes forget or choose not to.
Instead of a full version history, maybe keeping a simple record of the magnitude and nature of the changes might be valuable. For example, if I go back and just insert a few commas, the edit note might say
@Crespyl added 2 bytes at ..., or if I decide that a paragraph is offtopic and unecessary@Crespyl removed 400 bytes at ....This doesn't need to be very clever, we could just track the total length of the comment, so removing a paragraph and replacing it with a shorter note would only show up as a slightly smaller removal; but I think this approach would provide most of the peace of mind I'd get from an edit log, without the issues of retaining content that we morally or legally cannot.
This is a really good point and I really like your suggestion. Often, this is what I'm looking for too.
(Though I am guilty of only adding an "Edit" when it's not a quick typo fix.)
Yeah that is very similar to my original edit heatmap with time stamps suggestion. More often than not, for peace of mind and even effective moderation, you don’t need to know the specifics of the edits and simply having the volume, position and frequency would be enough to determine whether someone was simply editing spelling/grammar or fundamentally altering the substance of their comment.
After reading the other (great) discussion on this thread, I'd like to throw out my suggestion, which is more or less a combination of the other ideas presented.
It seems to me that a combination of a "magnitude of edits" based log like the one that @Crespyl mentioned and a cultural norm similar to what @acr mentioned in the second paragraph of their post would be a pretty effective solution. I see this as being somewhat similar to the culture that Hacker News has developed in which it is overall frowned upon to edit one's comment and, if one does edit, that that the reasoning behind that edit be explained.
If we were to create a culture in which one typically does not edit their comment, but, if they do, they provide some reasoning as to why or, as @acr said, strike out the old so that it is still visible, we make it possible for someone who accidentally posts PII or takes a stance that they later reconsider to fix that. To back this up from a transparency point of view, we could use the idea that @Crespyl presented to enforce the cultural side. Namely, if someone edits something and says they removed PII or made a spelling change but the magnitude of their edit says otherwise, regular or trusted users could call them on that and ask them to explain. This seems like it could catch users such as @hypnotoad (who was banned for making provocative posts and then editing them to change what seemed to be his point of view) while keeping clear of privacy and other issues.