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Re: [Ring] redaction feature
From: |
Julian Foad |
Subject: |
Re: [Ring] redaction feature |
Date: |
Thu, 7 Dec 2017 10:01:35 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0 |
bill-auger wrote:
[...] a terrible feature that discourages mindful communication and
facilitates evasion of the responsibility for one's words
[...] think carefully before you press "send" or simply stop
worrying [...]
I feel embarrassed when I make a mistake in front of all my correspondents.
I want to correct my mistake.
I have plenty of ways I can "speak" my correction, certainly:
"I meant 'Bob', of course."
"Sorry, that should be 'Bob'."
"s/boob/Bob/"
"*Bob"
This is a modern computer system so why on earth can't it let me make my
correction directly, like in a WYSIWYG word-processor? Why should I have
to write another message in which I indirectly, fuzzily, refer to a
mistake which my correspondents have to interpret as probably being in
the last or one of the few last messages I wrote, or perhaps I was
pointing out a mistake in someone else's recent message, when the
computer could perfectly well enable me to point precisely at the place
I mean and display a clear indication of what I want to change it to?
Like when "show changes" is enabled on a word processor, and the
computer shows the old text with strike-through and the new text with
underlining and/or different colours.
When I "speak" my correction, the other participants can judge whether I
am behaving inappropriately or trying to pretend I didn't really mean
something I said before. Similarly, if I use a computer-assisted
correction mechanism, it should also enable the participants to see so
they can judge me, and the social pressure of the group is what keeps
the participants honest.
Here is a real example of the "honesty" principle. I use and participate
in the development of the Subversion version-control system, and one of
its features is you can edit the log message of an old committed change.
One could potentially misuse this to pretend that the change was made
for a different reason, or by a different person, or had been tested
when in fact it had not been tested. But the social conventions of a
team mean that the feature is in practice not abused -- because if
someone abused it then they would not be welcome to stay in the team.
What I am trying to say is don't underestimate the importance of giving
users a good way to achieve their basic need to be seen as a pleasant or
careful correspondent, or whatever particular characteristic is
important in their situation.
This doesn't mean the system should allow arbitrary un-tracked editing
of any and all messages, certainly not. A system that pretends it has
absolutely finally redacted or replaced a message is lying, in
principle, so that is a bad user interface, and just annotating the new
version with "(edited)" is hardly any better if it does not let you see
the old version. But then going the whole way the other way and showing
a whole (branched?) version history is ridiculous too.
But there are some lovely shades of grey in between black and white.
- Julian
- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Óvári, 2017/12/02
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- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Nicolas Jäger, 2017/12/05
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- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Nicolas Jäger, 2017/12/06
- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Anna Marei, 2017/12/06
- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Nicolas Jäger, 2017/12/06
- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Anna Marei, 2017/12/06
- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux (re: redaction feature), bill-auger, 2017/12/06
- Re: [Ring] redaction feature,
Julian Foad <=
- Re: [Ring] redaction feature, Adonay Felipe Nogueira, 2017/12/07
- Re: [Ring] redaction feature, bill-auger, 2017/12/07
- Re: [Ring] redaction feature, Julian Foad, 2017/12/08
- Re: [Ring] Import an account on Linux, Óvári, 2017/12/06
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- Re: [Ring] gerrit8480, Nicolas Jäger, 2017/12/15
- Re: [Ring] gerrit8480, Anna Marei, 2017/12/15