Thunder has an option to dim read posts.

That’s because, currently, the community stats that you see in the sidebar are only from your instance – community stats are currently not federated. Afaik, federated community stats are going to be implemented in 0.19.

and see people upvote their own comment.

Upvoting one’s own comment is default behaviour on Lemmy. When a user makes a post, or comment on Lemmy, it gets automatically upvoted by that user.

This isn’t necessarily about the sheer size of population, and has more to do with birth rates, but this Kurzgesagt video also outlines well the need for a higher birth rate.

Almost all countries need to reduce their population.

On the contrary, actually, we need to increase our populations. Assuming that you mean an equal reduction in all demographics, the existence of productive, and hyper-productive people is mostly a game of statistics. A larger population means that more of such people will exist. Such individuals are necessary for pushing humanity forward. A nation with a larger population means a larger natural defence. A larger gloabal population decreases the chances of a mass-extinction event.

it’s stressing the system.

What specific stresses are you referring to? We have no lacking in resources, nor space. Economic activity is proportional to those acting within it.

For reference, the article does point out the following:

The United States said it was discussing with relief agencies how “safe areas” could be set up for civilians in Gaza. “One of the things that we did discuss with [Israel] was the need to protect civilian lives in Gaza, the need to establish some safe areas, where civilians could relocate to be safe from Israel’s legitimate security operations,” said a senior U.S. State Department official in briefing reporters. “So we’ve been engaged with the International Committee for the Red Cross, the UN relief agencies to work through the details of what that might look like. It’s still work that’s coming together. The Israelis are committed to it,” the official said.

The article also provides a map of the total evacuation area, which I assume was also provided to the Palestinians. Given that this evacuation area only applies to the north of the Gaza strip, I would assume that the evacuees could flee to the south. I’m not arguing that this is practical given the circumstances, but there technically are places to go.

Please correct me if there is extra information that would suggest that evacuation to the south is also not an option. There’s a lot of information out there regarding this situation, and I am not at all fully educated on the matter.

What is your rationale for making that statement?

It could be as simple as updating a post with an outcome. You paste in a link and don’t realise until too late that you actually pasted in your personal email address. Do you then have to delete the whole thread and all it’s 1000 comments?

Hm, that’s actually a very good counterexample. I hadn’t considered that.

From what I understood of their comment on GitHub, it didn’t seem to be that they fundamentally disliked the idea of the feature, but more that they didn’t think that the community would find enough use from it to make its implementation worth it.

I don’t have any comment on phpBB specifically, but I do frequently encounter the issue on old Reddit posts; however, it should be noted that the majority of the types of changes to comments that reduce the usefuleness of a post thread is their deletion, which is out of the scope of this post.

If we prioritize discussion above all else, we’ll get more discussion, but the average quality will go down

Not necessarily. One must look at the underlying reason(s) for why people aren’t contributing to discussions. If it is indeed that they have nothing of quality to input, and are then incentivized to do so, then, yes, that will cause a reduction in discussion quality. But what if, instead, users capable of producing high quality content aren’t contributing because they don’t feel that their opinion is welcome in the discussion – that they are afraid of being harassed, or ostracized? If these users begin to contribute more, then the quality would theoretically increase. Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily be that simple in practice, but I would assume that it would have a different effect than the former example.

A lot of low quality discussion isn’t going to attract the type of users that made Reddit great

I am hesitant to agree that Reddit was consistently producing only high quality content 😜 I would argue that the more likely explanation is that there was a flat increase in volume of content being posted, and the people sorting by new had statistically more good content to choose from. Unless, of course, this is what you are referring to.

I think better moderation tools is more important than comment and post edit history

I strongly agree. Not because I personally have any use for better moderation tools, but that appears to be a major, and most likely primary complaint that many people have when they come to Lemmy from other platforms like Reddit.

Sure, but then your comment chain doesn’t make sense, or if it’s a post them you lose all the comments.

I would assume that if there was information that is being redacted, then it would happen very early on in the posts creation – presumably before any comments are even made.

I disagree

How come? If you can censor the edit history, then you can’t trust the edit history. Perhaps something that could help was if the edit that was redacted should be replaced with an entry that states something like “This edit was redacted.”. In my opinion, this is inferior to having a persistent edit history, but perhaps it’s a potentially functional compromise.

It depends what was exactly meant by the original comment. If it was that 99% of users wont edit their comments, then yes it won’t add much extra hosting cost, but if was that 99% of people won’t access it, then you are right in that it makes no difference.

So that’s about 100GB/year of text? If so, then that is, indeed, a very large amount of text being generated.

Borg good

The root shortcoming is that changing one letter gets the same flag as replacing the whole comment or adding a wall of text.

Fair point.

Over what period of time? What’s the current rate of increase?

Would you mind also defining what you meant by “huge”?

It’s not something I would care about or ever use.

I think it’s better to look at this not from the perspective of one’s own personal gain, but the benefit that it provides to the site on the whole.

It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out

Would you mind stating the exact “unresolved problems” that you are referring to?

it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.

I believe that the feature’s existence provides the passive benefit of increasing the average quality of posted content.

Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren’t willing to do the work, then it’s dead

What’s bothersome about that is that the dev didn’t just say that they didn’t want to work on it, they closed it. I completely understand if the dev doesn’t want to work on it personally, but closing it gives one the feeling that future discussion on the topic is not wanted – not to mention that it also greatly reduces its visibility.

opening a thread about it isn’t a helpful way of fixing that.

No, but I wanted to have more discussion that what was had on GitHub. I figured that posting about it here would yield a much larger audience, and, perhaps, less biased opinions.

It adds nothing to the discussion.

It wouldn’t technically add content (unless you count the peristant old versions as added content), it provides passive improvement to quality.

Also, I’m hosting my own instance (for others as well) and the (unoptimized) storage use is already huge.

What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?

No need to pay for something I don’t really care about.

Do note that, presumably, were this feature to be implemented, it would likely be able to be disabled on the side of the instance – meaning that your instance wouldn’t store any of the edits itself.