Ignore obnoxious comment signatures, make dogwhistles more transparent, remind yourself not to interact with certain topics, uncensor common celf-censorship euphemisms, or just apply some good 'ol censorship of your own. What I am imagining is a system that allows the user to set custom regular expression rules that get applied to all comments. There could be both global rules (that apply to every single comment) and user rules (that apply to all comments from just that user, similar to custom user labels).
What are your thoughts on having a feature like this in whatever app you use? Would you even find it useful at all? If the change is only visible to the user, is there any abuse potential?
Pictured here is a proof of concept showing Thunder with a simple "Cloud To Butt" function applied.
The abuse potential would be that I think it opens the door to more easily create convincing doctored screenshots of comments and interactions. It's technically possible already, but I don't think we've really seen it on lemmy yet. There's ways around that, like formatting replaced text differently or marking those comments with a clear icon to indicate a regex replacement was used on them, but I still don't particularly like the idea.
I'm thinking that it would also make it easy for people to have confusing interactions, if somehow a regex ends up changing the meaning of a statement or something, and the user forgets they have it set up. I guess the "big icon indicating regex was applied" idea would work there too though. Maybe the icon could even be a button to toggle it on/off per comment?
The common use case I see for regex features on social media apps and addons is for hiding entire comments that match one of your patterns, and I generally think that's the best choice for implementation.
That said, with a clear indicator it had been applied it probably wouldn't be awful.
But yeah, your other points are valid. Anything replaced needs to be indicated / highlighted / otherwise marked as not the original text.