Lemmy Support @lemmy.ml diyrebel @lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 yr. ago

Lemmy bug: notification not given when a previously read msg is edited

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1702086

So Bob replies to Alice, who then reads the msg and marks it as read. Then Bob makes some significant changes to the msg like adding lots of useful information that further answers Alice’s question. Alice gets no notification that the reply was updated.

6 comments

Most discussion forums doesn’t do this; Reddit doesn’t do this; I don’t see why Lemmy should do this. Best practice is to post a new reply, and that’s kind of how things have been since pretty much early 2000s if not earlier.
- Heh.. the funny irony here is that you actually missed my update to the OP, which says:
  
  “For comparison, note that Mastodon (at least some versions) notify you upon edits of msgs that you were previously notified on.”
  
  That’s of course a different scenario since crossposts don’t update (which could be a separate interesting discussion). But funny nonetheless because you missed an update while saying that tools should not be improved in favor of social / cultural change. I guess you should have thought to read the OP and compare it for changes (the social solution) :)
  
  that’s kind of how things have been since pretty much early 2000s if not earlier.
  
  We can dispense any sort of “conventional wisdom” in the course of moving forward with improvements.
  
  Very specifically the comment that inspired my post was someone posting misinformation, then going back and adding a s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ and highlighting their correction in red text. No correction would be more readable than that. The problem with your proposal is that misinformation is left there persistently misinforming. That can then be taken out of context (e.g. someone screensnaps the misinfo & uses it against the author). There’s also the problem that readers often do not read a whole thread top to bottom. This is proven by the number of votes (up or down), which appear in high numbers on high comments and drop dramatically after ~3 or so replies. You might argue that the post can be deleted, but that then creates a problem of responses not having context. And it creates confusion as people wonder “didn’t person X say Y?”
  
  So let me get this straight… Bob does something no one else does — edit messages on somewhere no one else goes, adding significant content to something no one sees — and then Bob wants to spam the world about the update with notification? Why would the world care when everyone else expect Bob to post an actual update?
  
  Also, in this context, this wouldn’t be a bug, but rather a feature request … a feature that no one is asking for, and doesn’t make the software better except to those that doesn’t follow social norms yet still demands to get into others’ inboxes.
  
  Instead, the appropriate behaviour is to not allow Bob to make edits after sometime (which many softwares have such feature for), and/or make edit logs visible (also a common feature), such that people who doesn’t follow expected norms cannot create mass confusion by doing things no one else does, against the grains of expected norms.
Just "spitballing" here...

If the message is edited for typos/grammatical errors, then there's really no need for a notification as the message displays the posted time in italics (e.g., ✏ 9 hours ago).

If the message is so reworked as to say something else, "Bob" (your example) should do the right thing and post a new, separate reply to "Alice" in the same thread, donchathink?

I get what you're saying though, that there should be some real integrity toward post/reply history, like diff maybe.
- If the message is edited for typos/grammatical errors, then there’s really no need for a notification as the message displays the posted time in italics (e.g., ✏ 9 hours ago).
  
  I’m not sure why the relevance of the posted time in this scenario, but indeed I agree simply that typos need not generate an update notice, in principle.
  
  If the message is so reworked as to say something else, “Bob” (your example) should do the right thing and post a new, separate reply to “Alice” in the same thread, donchathink?
  
  This requires Bob to care whether Alice gets the update. Bob might care more about the aesthetics, readability, and the risk that misinfo could be taken out of context if not corrected in the very same msg where the misinfo occurred. If I discover something I posted contained some misinfo, my top concern is propagation of the misinfo. If I post a reply below it saying “actually, i was wrong, … etc”, there are readers who would stop reading just short of the correction msg. Someone could also screenshot the misinfo & either deliberately or accidentally omit Bob’s correction. So it’s only sensible to correct misinfo directly where it occurred.
  
  I get what you’re saying though, that there should be some real integrity toward post/reply history, like diff maybe.
  
  It would be interesting to see exactly what Mastodon does.. whether it has an algorithm that tries to separate typos/grammer from more substantive edits. I don’t frequently get notices on Mastodon when someone updates a status that mentions me, so I somewhat suspect it’s only for significant edits.
  
  (update) one simple approach would be to detect when a ~~strikethrough~~ is added. Though it wouldn’t catch all cases.

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