> I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting.
I used to think so to but I no longer think having the history of a comment has much value.
If someone is consistently making dishonest edits people will call them out on it without needing to point to an integrated version history.
Mist edits are made probably to fix grammatical and factual mistakes. Who cares about the history for that.
What I do wish for instead would be that you could request deletion of a response to your comment after you’d remedied some error that they pointed out because once fixed that comment is no longer needed. So A writes a comment, B corrects them. A fixed their comment and attributes B then sends a deletion request to B.
However at that point perhaps full collaborative editing would be useful, like they have on the Stack Exchange sites and Wikipedia. Then comment history would be useful so that you could inspect individual comments and revert them.
I have a specific type of collaborative editing in mind for sites like HN, and Reddit, namely that threads of multiple comments would be summarized and condensed into single comments so that they are fast to read through for people that visit the thread in the future. Again, contributors would be attributed and would get a share of the karma when the summary is upvoted corresponding to how much information they contributed.
Of course that is a nice idea in theory but probably not realistically doable. It would be impossible to find enough people that are both willing to do this work and at the same time do so with an “objective” eye, and to not even get paid for it.
Encyclopedic articles and Q&A sites are a good fit as we’ve seen with Wikipedia and the Stack Exchange sites. For general discussions I think it would not.
There are times I’d like broaden a comment.
Reddit has a visual indicator for edited posts, I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting.