I see in comments sections of subs that people who make edits to their comments will explain their edits. What happens if you don’t explain your edit? Will others know that I’ve made an edit without explaining it? And why would they care?
In: Other
If you edit a comment, there’s an asterisk next to your username. So people can see that the comment was edited.
It’s considered good Reddiquette (which is this site’s cutesy term for etiquette) to explain your edits
Moderators might know whether you’ve edited your post. Most regular users won’t.
As to why they would care:
Imagine that you make a comment:
“I just found out about blue whales, such amazing fish!”
And someone replies to you:
“Whales aren’t fish, they’re mammals.”
And then you edit your comment to say,
“I just found out about blue whales, such amazing mammals!”
If you don’t say that you’ve edited your post and why, the person who replied to you now looks like an auto-correct bot at best, or an absolute idiot at worst.
So it’s just a bit of etiquette so as to not make your fellow posters look foolish when you were the one who was incorrect to begin with.
They can see that it’s edited and when, the purpose of explaining the edit is a courtesy so that any replies or votes prior to the edit will be contextualized. There’s no reddit police coming after you, many just consider it polite.
Edit: hey look an example! I fixed some spelling but no changes to the meaning.
Nothing strictly happens for not explaining an edit. Generally it’s not against the rules or anything.
Usually it’s good practice to note an edit if it affects the context of people that already replied to you. Like if someone points out a factual error and I fix it, I leave the original text crossed out so the other person doesn’t get a barrage of people telling them they read my comment wrong.
On the other hand, if I just happen just notice a spelling error or whatever and fix it, I won’t note the edit. Additionally, edits in the first minute won’t actually mark comment as edited, specifically because it’s usually tiny things like that.
A popular ‘joke’ from the early popularity of message boards/Facebook:
* Make a statement that is polarizing (either popular or offensive)
* Be responded to, either with people agreeing with you or calling you a terrible person
* Edit your statement to be the opposite
* Now you’ve got what looks like a normal statement being called out for no reason, or an offensive statement with people agreeing to it
Having a note saying that your comment was edited removes most of the fun of this ‘joke’. But now that people knew about the potential, if they see your ‘edited’ comment with no explanation, there’s a suspicion that the edits changed the meaning into something completely different. So explaining the edits makes it more believable that the edits were harmless. Or the notes combined with ~~strikethrough~~ explain the edits in a way that makes sense.
Along with what others said, you can be a grown up and own your mistakes when editing by striking out your original text.
~~The incorrect statement~~ results in ~~The incorrect comment~~
The purpose of the edit notification is so people know that a change has been made. If you explain why you edited it, it is trustworthy, because they have some idea what the comment was before. If not, you could have changed literally anything and no one would know what it used to be unless they took screenshots.
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