[OceanKing]

Regarding the last point specifically, there is an established texting convention. Say you you (or autocorrect) have made a mistake and typed word A and you have already sent the message, but really you meant word B. Then, if you notice this mistake (granted, if), it is common convention to simply reply “*B”. Then, when the recipient reads to the mistaken word A and wonders why the word A seems out of place, they can look at the subsequent message and substitute B for A, without you even having to explicitly designate which word you made a mistake in (this is still sometimes necessary, but rarely).

[thomasahle]

I haven't seen that convention used. Not that it's any bad.

Personally I use /s/old/new which also had the benefit of some platforms, like slack, automatically fixing the original message.

[StavrosK]

I've seen *correction used extensively among my non-technical peers, the sed syntax is more common across technical ones.

[randallsquared]

Wait, what? I've used that, but I don't think I've ever seen Slack fix the original!

[thomasahle]

Yeah, it's not really documented, so I was quite surprised when it first happened. They talk about it here though: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/505178492431269888

[lordgrenville]

Slack has some surprising, hard to discover UI tricks. Another one I learned recently is you can make text into a hyperlink by copying a URL to your clipboard, highlighting the text in Slack, and pasting. https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/1240387882507997186

[mercer]

Ha, cool trick! Reminds me of the Trello trick where if you press the 'copy' keyboard shortcut while hovering over a card, it will copy a link to that specific card.

[mercer]

that's an awesome trick. Thanks!

[michaelcampbell]

Requires a leading /. Discord does this too, but without that requirement.

[Agentlien]

My friends and I have used this convention for IM apps since 2003. I haven't seen anyone do it for SMS, though.

[kohtatsu]

sed-style works in discord too without the leading /

  s/search/replace

Bothers me that it won't trim a trailing / tho.

FWIW it's usually faster just to press up (another shortcut to edit the last message) and word jump to fix.

Also FWIW I've always seen the asterisk apended.

“appended*”

[bagacrap]

I see and use "B" as a correction instead of "B". It's very annoying when I'm correcting autocorrect, ie B automatically changed to A, because then in the follow up message it usually changes it again, so I end up with A*.

[OceanKing]

That’s why you put the asterisk first - that way, autocorrect doesn’t correct the word after it (at least for me)

[aaron695]

Why can't you edit sent messages?

Why have we accepted this reality? That's what's truly bizarre.

[hoseja]

Because it brings more problems than solutions.

[aaron695]

Like what?

Slack can do it, what are they so special?

I guess maybe in a fluent back and forward it might slow people a little worrying about things they shouldn't. But this is not my experience.

This inability seems the IT industry at it's worse. It's like some Frankenstein putting immutability onto human beings.

[scbrg]

> This inability seems the IT industry at it's worse. It's like some Frankenstein putting immutability onto human beings.

I don't understand. Communication has historically not been possible to "edit". There's nothing inhuman about that. If I say something, I've said it. Of course I can later make a correction, but the words I said remain said. The same has been true for the thousands of years we've had written communication, until a few years ago (on some platforms).

Personally, I find editing messages a misfeature. There's few things more annoying than replying to a message, and then finding out that the message you're replying to has been replaced by another one. If a platform has this feature, it makes me less likely to use it.

[mercer]

While I do agree, I find that marking a message as 'edited' (like Telegram does) makes it less of a problem for me. Bonus points if I can click to see the original message!

[aaron695]

No, we have always been able to edit communication until the internet, because conversations/everything has always been unrecorded or very hard to access the archives of.

Have you never had an argument get to 'you said this', 'no I did not' ? We even edit our own messaging in our heads.

We make mistakes, why can't we correct them?

(We are talking autocomplete of spelling and grammar here at the original level)

And since obviously your end can have a setting/hack/default to keep the original anyway I'm not sure what the fear is.

[scbrg]

> No, we have always been able to edit communication until the internet, because conversations/everything has always been unrecorded or very hard to access the archives of.

Spoken, yes. Written, no. But sure, most communication is (and certainly was) spoken, I'll give you that.

> Have you never had an argument get to 'you said this', 'no I did not' ? We even edit our own messaging in our heads.

I'm afraid I have. They suck tremendously. Do you think these arguments are a good thing?

> We make mistakes, why can't we correct them?

We can. We post a correction. "Sorry, I meant to say this."

> (We are talking autocomplete of spelling and grammar here at the original level)

Unless you produce a magic AI that lets people fix only spelling mistakes and nothing else, we're not talking about just that.

> And since obviously your end can have a setting/hack/default to keep the original anyway I'm not sure what the fear is.

Most communication platforms these days are actually not controlled by the users, so no, I can't have a setting for it. And if I have a hack for it (which probably requires a tremendous amount of technical expertise, out of reach for most people), I'm almost certainly in violation of some EOL and may get banned. Heck, in some crazy jurisdictions I could even end up in trouble with the law.

[pfortuny]

“didn’t you read my message? I said at 19:00.”

You said “9:00”.

“go check”.

and that for a simple interaction, imagine a complex argument...

[aaron695]

If your friends are lying to you then that's not a message problem.

Plus it's silly, most mark the message as changed and some have an audit trail like Slack.

I'm not sure what scenario this plays out in?

[function_seven]

Any SMS conversations that aren't with trusted friends. Like landlords, or bosses, or maybe arranging the visitation with your ex.

As far as an audit trail is concerned, you'd need to have all the cell carriers update their SMS infrastructure to save the associated edit history along with the text of each message. That's definitely non-trivial.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea to have this feature, just that it's much more work than you realize, and the benefit is probably not there to justify the work. Slack has the luxury of controlling their entire platform. They don't rely on Ericsson or Qualcomm or Nokia to implement new features the way SMS would.

[pfortuny]

Any meaningful conversation in which past words are important for the contents of the message.

I mean, do I really have to reread all the "marked as changed" messages even though only a tiny part may have changed etc...?

Normal people tend to fare very well with "sorry, made a mistake: ...."