Ben has also been quietly fixing errors in the post, which I appreciate, but people are going around right now attacking us for things that Ben got wrong, because how would they know he quietly changed the post?
This is why every time newspapers get caught making a mistake they issue a public retraction the next day to let everyone know. I believe Ben should make these retractions more visible.
“Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022” became “Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February”
“using Lightcone funds” became “using personal funds”
Possibly I made a mistake, or Ben made edits and you saw them and then Ben reverted them—if so, I encourage you/anyone to point to another specific edit, possibly on other archive.org versions.
Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.
Ah, sorry. I think what happened is that I was remembering the post from the draft he sent us just before it went live. At least from the post on WebArchive, the things I remember having been changed happened last minute between the draft and it going live. Only one of the changes I remember happened between the web archive shot and now.
To be fair, I think that change is large and causing a lot of problems (for example, burgergate, people thinking she was working for us at the time, instead of just a friend). However, it does look like I was wrong about that, and I retract my statement.
I’ll edit the comment where I said that. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Thanks for looking into it.
For the record, I agree that it would be helpful for situations like these for us to have a publicly accessible version history, and think it would be good if we built that feature for the site.
This seems important. The differences mentioned above don’t seem particularly important to me. If they are in fact the only differences, I wouldn’t expect someone with good/honorable intentions to frame the “quietly fixing errors” comment the way Emerson did.
Sorry. It was night time when this came out and I’m swamped with comments and trying to gather evidence. Responded to it as soon as I could. You can see my response here.
Site admins, would it be possible to see the edit history of posts, perhaps in diff format (or at least make that a default that authors can opt out of)? Seems like something I want in a few cases:
controversial posts like these
sometimes mods edit my posts and I’d like to know what they edited
I thought we did have that feature on LW some time ago, as an icon at the top of the page in the same section as the author byline, with a tooltip that said something like “this post has undergone multiple revisions”. But I don’t see it here. I don’t know if I hallucinated that feature, or misremembered it, or I got confused because it’s on a similar website, or if the feature was only temporarily available, or what.
I guess there’s still a need to be able to hide or delete versions as an author, e.g. if one accidentally doxxed someone by posting personal information. But outside of rare exceptions like that, there would likely be no problem of keeping the edits public.
I used a diff checker to find the differences between the current post and the original post. There seem to be two:
“Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022” became “Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February”
“using Lightcone funds” became “using personal funds”
Possibly I made a mistake, or Ben made edits and you saw them and then Ben reverted them—if so, I encourage you/anyone to point to another specific edit, possibly on other archive.org versions.
Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.
Ah, sorry. I think what happened is that I was remembering the post from the draft he sent us just before it went live. At least from the post on WebArchive, the things I remember having been changed happened last minute between the draft and it going live. Only one of the changes I remember happened between the web archive shot and now.
To be fair, I think that change is large and causing a lot of problems (for example, burgergate, people thinking she was working for us at the time, instead of just a friend). However, it does look like I was wrong about that, and I retract my statement.
I’ll edit the comment where I said that. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Thanks for looking into it.
For the record, I agree that it would be helpful for situations like these for us to have a publicly accessible version history, and think it would be good if we built that feature for the site.
This seems important. The differences mentioned above don’t seem particularly important to me. If they are in fact the only differences, I wouldn’t expect someone with good/honorable intentions to frame the “quietly fixing errors” comment the way Emerson did.
Yeah. That plus an even stronger similar claim from Kat casts doubt on their reliability, especially given how they seem to almost never say “oops.”
Update: Kat said oops and has a reasonable explanation, yay.
Yeah. The lack of “oops” is something that caught my eye as well, and I think that it is noteworthy.
Sorry. It was night time when this came out and I’m swamped with comments and trying to gather evidence. Responded to it as soon as I could. You can see my response here.
Site admins, would it be possible to see the edit history of posts, perhaps in diff format (or at least make that a default that authors can opt out of)? Seems like something I want in a few cases:
controversial posts like these
sometimes mods edit my posts and I’d like to know what they edited
I thought we did have that feature on LW some time ago, as an icon at the top of the page in the same section as the author byline, with a tooltip that said something like “this post has undergone multiple revisions”. But I don’t see it here. I don’t know if I hallucinated that feature, or misremembered it, or I got confused because it’s on a similar website, or if the feature was only temporarily available, or what.
The original version of it only appeared when a post had been updated with a “major edit” (a manual flag authors can set on post edits)
I do think it’s pretty dumb to not just let people read all the previous edits though, so I’ll look into fixing that soon hopefully.
I guess there’s still a need to be able to hide or delete versions as an author, e.g. if one accidentally doxxed someone by posting personal information. But outside of rare exceptions like that, there would likely be no problem of keeping the edits public.