A discussion is underway about the option to reset likes on edited posts. Stephen initiated the conversation, sharing an incident where a heavily-liked post was edited to contain offensive viewpoints, resulting in users who liked the original post receiving abuse. He suggests resetting likes when a post is edited to prevent such situations.
Dannii mentions the edit time limit as a related consideration, while Stephen reiterates the importance of addressing this issue, particularly in communities that value likes.
codinghorror suggests deleting the post after it is flagged, as a radical edit that changes the meaning is in bad faith.
tophee proposes alternative solutions, including timestamping likes or storing the revision of the post that was liked. This would allow users to see which version of the post they liked and avoid withdrawing their likes due to changes made later.
There was an incident this weekend in one of the communities I work with. A heavily-liked post was edited to contain some pretty offensive viewpoints.
The users who had liked the previous version of the post in turn received abuse for ‘supporting such terrible statements’.
Likes and re-shares are one of the reasons platforms such as Twitter said an edit button would be inappropriate. I don’t want them to go for the nuclear option to disable likes wholesale, and instead wanted to ask- has any consideration been given to resetting likes on a post when it’s changed?
Maybe timestamping likes could solve this problem? I don’t know if this information is currently even stired in the database, but if it is, it could be made available to users, perhaps next to the username that appears on mouse over the avatar of the user who liked the post.
Or wait, we don’t even need that much information. It would suffice to store which revision of the post was liked (and as long as it is the current revision, that information would also be hidden).
I have no idea how difficult this is to implement, but I’d like to say that this would be useful also in less extreme cases that the one in the OP. I do remember returning to a post I originally liked and noticing that it had been edited - not a lot, but sufficiently to make me withdraw my like. If users could have seen that it was the original version on the post that I liked, I would not have withdrawn it. Most importantly, though, it was only by chance that I noticed the change.
Another possibility might be to allow users to receive notifications on edits for posts that they have liked. But that sounds like a bigger project…