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Re:Bye, Amazon by tempestn on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:19PM (#23073399)
How feasible would it be to actually enforce that in the code? Would be great if edits were append-only after some period of time. So you could correct a typo immediately after posting still, but after a few minutes you'd just be able to append. (Replying to your own comment doesn't serve the same function, since it could be lost under other replies.)
Re:Bye, Amazon by pvg on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:18PM (#23074037)
There is a 2 hour edit window, after which you can't edit the comment. Editing a comment to change the meaning is usually noticed so I think social convention takes care of this (relatively uncommon) problem as it is.
Re:Bye, Amazon by krapp on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:32PM (#23073563)
It would probably be better to just disallow editing to any comment with replies.
Re:Bye, Amazon by saagarjha on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:52PM (#23073766)
Or have an auditable edit history.
Re:Bye, Amazon by tempestn on Monday May 04, 2020 @10:06PM (#23075613)
I like that suggestion even more than mine. Could be a link beside the timestamp, like "4 hours ago (edited)" and clicking the edited stamp would give you a history. I edit my comments all the time and wouldn't want to lose the ability to improve my wording or fix typos or whatever, but I don't see any harm in that transparency. The ability to completely delete a comment (along with any history) should probably be preserved though.
Re:Bye, Amazon by krapp on Monday May 04, 2020 @07:00PM (#23074375)
That might work if you could link individual comments to a version of their parent, otherwise confusing over comments not making sense in the current context would still occur, since most people aren't going to read an edit history first.

The very least they could do is add some visual cue that a comment has been edited, like showing the header in italics or adding an asterisk.

Re:Bye, Amazon by saagarjha on Monday May 04, 2020 @07:07PM (#23074426)
I think a visual indication that a comment was edited, then diffs of all their edits, would be very nice to have. I have run into (and caught) people that make provocative comments and then edit them to make the people responding to them look foolish.