Old habits die hard, but there’s Reddiquette which needs to be revived, and some which needs to die.
Many “golden-age” redditors remember a time when downvoting was reserved for hostility, not a different opinion. For the sake of our growing community I would like to implore everyone to be awesome to each other.
However, this place is not Reddit.
- We don’t measure in bananas here.
- We don’t need to append “edit: typo” to edited posts and comments.
- if you see something which is worthy of a downvote: down vote and move on! Don’t engage with it and feed the algorithm/engament machine so other people are exposed to it when sorting by active.
This argument never really made sense to me. Anyone who is being deceptive is not going to tell people they’re editing their comments.
It’s the result of nothing more than a moral panic. There aren’t roving bands of keyboard warriors rolling around making comments and then editing them to make others look stupid.
And even if there were, they could just include “edit: typo” and get away with it. Unless someone takes screenshots.
I think it says more about the community that everyone is expected to prove their innocence. Let’s have a little faith in each other, we’re better than that.
It makes sense to me and I’ve been editing comments this way since the early 2000’s. For some, it’s a cultural practice that’s probably decades old.
If the platform didn’t state the comment was edited, I probably wouldn’t bother but if it does, there is always a thought at the back of the reader’s mind about what happened. Leaving a note about editing negates the thought. Leaving pointless edits less so.
I find it more ethical and transparent, particularly in discussion threads where debates are being held.
I get it as a cultural thing, but it makes no sense epistemologically.
An unethical person would not state they changed their comment, and a malicious person would state their edit was mundane. Those two factors alone render the practice of proving your innocence in advance moot.
I think it’s sad that people reflexively assume the worst. I used to engage in some heated debates on Reddit, but I was never accused of, or assumed the other person edited their posts to make me look bad. It seems like paranoid behaviour to me.
Strangely enough, if it became the norm to correct typos without stating it, the default assumption would be that the edit was a typo correction.