22
votes
Feature Idea - Notify users when a comment which they had interacted with is edited.
Mockup - see the top item.
I would love to be notified when a comment which I had interacted with has been edited. I have seen it mentioned by others a while back as well. My suggested implementation is a pretty minor UI change.
On https://tildes.net/notifications/unread there would be an additional listing type which begins with "Comment was edited on "
Any comment which the current user has replied to, or has upvoted, and has been edited would appear here.
I am experimenting with a simple survey below using comments, please upvote the one that best reflects your view. Of course, also feel free to discuss anything further in a normal comment, just trying to keep things organized.
Upvote this if you are in favor of this feature.
If inclined, please explain why.
It'd be nice to see if a comment changed after I looked at it because I probably wouldn't know it happened otherwise.
I'd prefer it if a diff-style edit history was available for comments in addition to this, but this alone is a good step in the direction I'd like to see with regards to comment editing. Nothing irritates me quite as much as somebody editing their comment after I've replied and left the thread.
I believe this was @deimos' position on this as well. The reason that stuck out in my mind was in case someone put info in that could lead to them being dox'ed.
Unfortunately I agree with that position, but I wish we lived in a world where @Krael's version would be cool.
You mean like me asking people to “please explain why” if they are physically at a specific range of angles? Three times. :)
I believe I should have written “If so inclined”
I'm all for people being able to opt-out of edit history for a comment if they choose so. I've personally experienced the consequences of having your entire history out there for everyone to see, so I understand why someone would want to clip information out.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#privacy
It would have to be opt-in to showing edit history, not opt-out... and I imagine very few people would do so, rendering it pretty pointless to include as a feature.
Ooo, that’s a great point.
I wholeheartedly agree. What might be a good middle ground is a percentage difference between the original post and the current version?
So if you just fix a typo or add few punctuation marks, if you hover over the edited text, it would give the timestamp and also something to the tune of "99% similar". That way you could easily identify if there's a substantial edit that could completely alter the context comment.
Could also be a complete waste of time and/or computational resources, though
Or changing would to wouldn't, as we saw in a recent example important to American foreign policy.
Oh yeah for sure. I think it would just be more interesting than anything, to be honest. Useful in some cases, but not at all a reliable indicator of, well, anything.
I like the mechanism you brought up. It is very conveniently called Edit Distance. I think that the edit distance should be used for my feature in general. So that if a typo was fixed, it would not rise to level of your notifications.
That's neat! Would definitely reduce the amount of clutter/noise if this was implemented
Yeah, realistically I know it'll never happen, for completely understandable reasons. It would just be nice if we could do that without bad actors ruining it for everybody.
Upvote this if you are opposed to this feature.
If inclined, please explain why.
In the case of your invalid link edits, yeah that would just be noise I guess. However, in other cases like the comment I used in my mockup, I was expanding the scope of my comment and people may chose to revoke their upvote, or add an additional reply, or change their reply.
Then there is the malicious case where people totally change the point of their comment.
Thanks to @Shirley’s comment, I was reminded of Edit Distance algorithms. Something along those lines could be used to filter out the noise?
Fair enough. This is why I made a survey first, instead of just making an issue right away.
Thanks!
What we really need is comment saving so you can easily go back and check on a comment later. As I understand this is something that we'll have soon with a new PR.
Upvote this if you are ambivalent about this feature.
If inclined, please explain why.
The main benefit of this in my mind was like the case of the example I used in the mockup. In that case I had really expanded the scope of my comment with the first edit, adding an analogy that folks may have agreed with, or not. This could have led them to unvote me, or add a new comment.
However, many people may not do what I did there very commonly.
Good to see someone trying polls. I'm a very big fan of doing things this way. We need it as a site feature someday so we can get real democracy in action.
I think what we're after here might best be implemented a bit differently. There's two aspects to this I'll discuss.
The only main benefit I can see here is being notified that a comment has changed while you are tying a reply to it so that you get the new info. This would require some fancy checking and I'm not sure Deimos is wild about having lots of scripts/connections open like that if it's not a major benefit. I wouldn't mind this feature, but I also wouldn't miss it. I can hit refresh and edit. I'm not too worried if someone edits something I reply to after I've replied, if I care that much about the thread I'll be checking it again tomorrow and I'll see the changes.
The other use is getting notified when something you are interested in changes. I think that might be better as a 'follow this comment/thread/wiki page' feature. I would like to be able to follow stuff like that and get an update when they change.
I just don't care enough.
If it happens, hey that's a nifty little trick, but it makes no difference to me, except possibly giving me mostly unwanted, uninteresting "@xxxxx edited their comment" notifications.
If it doesn't happen my life and behaviour on Tildes carries on as normal.
Could possibly be useful when the site has tens of millions of users all furiously arguing over stuff that doesn't matter.
It seems like a feature that would be neat, but that would be pretty annoying if it were on by default. If it were added I'd want it to be a setting I could toggle. That said, I'm not convinced it's worth the settings bloat to add it.
I like the idea of such edits being transparent, but I don't think it rises to the same level of notification as "you have a new reply".
That’s a really good point. At first I was thinking of having a separate tab for these items, but I simplified in the hopes of not making too many changes to the UI.
Edit: phrasing
As you said it was already discussed and for whoever missed it, the main points were:
Imagine this scenario:
OP create a topic, people respond. Then after a while OP notice that something change and decide to update the post instead of creating a new topic and maybe referencing the old one.
Every user that posted in the old topic will get a notification. Now multiply this for several users and several topics.
The end results is having plenty of old topics, probably never dying and discussions going on in always more nested comments, often referencing the initial version of the topic, then a following edit, and the next one, etc.
Other scenario:
User post about something. An uproar of indignation/admiration/whatever raise from the userbase of tildes.
Said user then hear that something changed and to be fair the people he made aware deserve to know the evolution of things. This happened in a matter of hours, while the topic is still hot and discussed. The update completely change the narrative so it's important that it is shared. So he does that and everyone is notified.
In the end, a mass movement that could have been mislead by a misunderstanding, is avoided because of a smart update that is relayed to anyone that partecipated.
The point here is that there are good and bad case but we couldn't think of a way to limit the bad cases and keep the benefits of a system like this.
Leaving it like it currently is is the best solution. The first case above is avoided. In the second case, because the "User" knows no one who originally replied is going to see his edits, he makes a new topic explaining the change (and that's what's appropriate, because things have changed). If he's inclined, he can message or reply to comments of users who he saw post highly-voted or very high-quality counterpoints to his original topic, to point out the new topic. If he can edit the original topic (I think you can do that here?), he can even link to his new topic to send users there before the indignation/admiration/whatever continues.
Would this happen for every single edit, or only edits outside the 5-minute "grace" period?
Not all edits are substantive edits. Some of us edit our comments to fix punctuation, spelling, grammar, and just general wording. I'd hate to think that my proofreading edits will create noise in people's inboxes.
Case in point: I just ninja-edited this comment because I wanted to fix the phrasing.
I was thinking that this would apply after the grace period. Though maybe not?
Regarding noise from typos, a common Edit Distance algorithm could be used to lower the noise threshold. Though not with issues and trade-offs.
It's your idea, not mine: you tell me!
My thinking was that if you had already voted on, or replied to the comment, then you would want to be notified of the edit.
However, the purpose of posting this survey/topic was not to disseminate my plans to everyone. Instead I hoped to gather valuable opinions from users such as yourself so that we could tweak the concept until it was good, or decided to toss it in the bin. As you can see by the votes people are pretty evenly divided with the against block raising some really valid points. The grace period aspect did not even occur to me until it was brought up here. I am open to hear the pros and cons of either setting.
edit: clarity and grammar
You didn't ask for opinions to tweak the concept, you asked for votes for or against the concept, with optional explanations about why people were for or against it. I merely posed a clarifying question so I knew what I would be voting for or against.
I've voted "ambivalent".
This is a very salient point. Oops.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/new
Yeah, I have been making issues, but I thought it would be useful to do a user survey first. If the upvotes turn out to be mostly not against, I’ll write it up. :)
FEATURE IDEA!:
I am very lonely. This is my main source of interacting with people (and I imagine thats true for a lot of people on here and reddit). I think we could foster a stronger sense of community (so long as tildes remains small) by talking not just as a group in these threads, but also individually.
we could have a message me mode. right next to your user name whenever you comment and it says something like "message_me!" and you click on that, and a a little private message box pops up and you can pm that perp. Or perhaps eve a perhaps proper chat like function.
Tildes already has a private message feature. Just go to a users profile and hit the private message button. Also, you're kind of hijacking his thread here :P.
lol EHHH....it's a related topic. And the point isn't that you can't already message people, it's that you turn on this "message_me!" feature to show that you WANT people to message you. That you could use some company, someone to talk to. About anything at all.
edit: how do I make a tilde post?
No, it's not. Having a user flag that says "message_me!" is not related to receiving notifications about edited comments.
Go to the group you want to post in (such as ~tildes). In the sidebar, you'll see a button that says "Post a new topic". Click on that.
It would change how you're interacting with the people on here. That's all I meant by being related.
"Go to the group you want to post in (such as ~tildes). In the sidebar, you'll see a button that says "Post a new topic". Click on that."
Thanks.