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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

Logs can be append-only, while clients can still show edits. These aren't in conflict.

It wouldn't have to be complex, either, and it certainly isn't useless (says me and a few other people already!).

Quick example: I recently typed out about 10 long lines of business development chatter in Slack, the first of which contained a list of prospects. I realized I left a few out in my list, and edited the message to add them in. Without editing, I'd have to have either posted the complete list again or added them in as a second comment. Editing the original message is simply a lot less confusing.

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Without editing, you could be sure that everyone saw your follow-on correction.

With editing if people read the first version of your opening message, you don't know if they saw the edits or not.

I find edits useful for typos/formatting/cosmetics, but I don't ever edit significant information into a previous post for that reason.

Whenever I see someone on my IRC channels type out 10 long lines of anything, I tell them to use some sort of pastebin instead.

Slack has a pastebin built in, too.

Slack has a pastebin built in, too.

I'm not sure why your comment was down voted, but as both an IRC and Slack user, I have to say I love Slack's built in pastebin.

https://www.glowing-bear.org/ introduces pastebin for IRC. And a ton of other Slack-esque features. Generally very great software.

Personally, I would treat the chat like a forum post and take more time to confirm that what I was posting was accurate. I have never used chat as for business purposes though, so thanks for the insight.

I do wonder though, should IRC evolve to be like Slack or should it evolve idependently? I feel that the new features should be more vital, rather than "neat"... like maybe more focus on privacy and/or anonymity. Undoubtedly, I am just resisting change...

Forum posts generally can be edited, too.

Right, but forums are a much slower, more "official" communication medium, so the edit feature makes more sense.

I see chat like in-person communication where editing something already said is impossible.

I think we're at the vi/emacs point of this discussion. Editing messages works well for me and my team, and we're glad of the feature. You don't have to like it, and I wouldn't force you to edit messages. The world supports both and we both win. :)

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