More random thoughts. I could see editing comments as a way to evade rate limits, as happened here. We don’t particularly have a norm against it yet, so I’m not really complaining about this particular occurrence, but consider what would happen if this pattern were to become widespread.
Demon threads might become epistles with lots of quotations. They might become harder to follow, and we’d only be able to vote on them once as a whole. This kind of seems like the same problem, but with a worse UI, although it might at least limit the blast radius.
Limiting word counts seems even worse. I think it’s fine to edit to correct typos, or to reword things to clarify the original intent. It’s also maybe acceptable to make additions if they’re done very quickly or even later if labeled as such (but I question even that for rate-limited users). But if the length of the post was limited and the number of comments were limited, I could see the original comment getting edit-replaced with the reply altogether. Do we really want it to work like that?
It seems dishonest to me to completely change a comment like that. Other sites show old edit revisions to mitigate this sort of abuse. If LessWrong has that feature, I haven’t found it yet. But if we had it, in combination with the rate and length limits, then we’d have to dig through the edit history to read the conversation. Again, same problem, but with a worse UI.
I suppose rate limiting or time limiting edits is a possibility. I don’t particularly like it. Five minutes or something (a common edit limit time on other sites) often isn’t enough time to proofread a longer comment. I don’t think there’s a way to preview how the markdown will render short of posting it (and even if there were, I’d probably miss things until after posting). I sometimes spot typos in my comments months later and correct them. The ability to freely edit like this is one of the things I like about LessWrong. It seems like a simple rule against abusing edits, and ways to notice (history) and report it (flags) and sanctions for violating it (Bans? Harsher rate limits?) is the best solution here.
Given that, the next workaround is probably a link to some other forum. I suppose we could try to block this somehow, but moving the conversation off site seems fine.
More random thoughts. I could see editing comments as a way to evade rate limits, as happened here. We don’t particularly have a norm against it yet, so I’m not really complaining about this particular occurrence, but consider what would happen if this pattern were to become widespread.
Demon threads might become epistles with lots of quotations. They might become harder to follow, and we’d only be able to vote on them once as a whole. This kind of seems like the same problem, but with a worse UI, although it might at least limit the blast radius.
Limiting word counts seems even worse. I think it’s fine to edit to correct typos, or to reword things to clarify the original intent. It’s also maybe acceptable to make additions if they’re done very quickly or even later if labeled as such (but I question even that for rate-limited users). But if the length of the post was limited and the number of comments were limited, I could see the original comment getting edit-replaced with the reply altogether. Do we really want it to work like that?
It seems dishonest to me to completely change a comment like that. Other sites show old edit revisions to mitigate this sort of abuse. If LessWrong has that feature, I haven’t found it yet. But if we had it, in combination with the rate and length limits, then we’d have to dig through the edit history to read the conversation. Again, same problem, but with a worse UI.
I suppose rate limiting or time limiting edits is a possibility. I don’t particularly like it. Five minutes or something (a common edit limit time on other sites) often isn’t enough time to proofread a longer comment. I don’t think there’s a way to preview how the markdown will render short of posting it (and even if there were, I’d probably miss things until after posting). I sometimes spot typos in my comments months later and correct them. The ability to freely edit like this is one of the things I like about LessWrong. It seems like a simple rule against abusing edits, and ways to notice (history) and report it (flags) and sanctions for violating it (Bans? Harsher rate limits?) is the best solution here.
Given that, the next workaround is probably a link to some other forum. I suppose we could try to block this somehow, but moving the conversation off site seems fine.