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.
This is very close to what I had in mind when saying "remind yourself not to interact with certain topics". That any time a comment contains a certain keyword/phrase, it could replace the entire comment with "I am a person not worth talking to".
What I have in mind would be a simple pair of textboxes for each filter policy: one for the regex pattern to search for, and one for the string to replace it with. Then a checkbox or something to toggle whether just the matched string gets replaced or the entire comment gets replaced when the pattern matches anywhere in the comment. Then, the user can add as many policies as they like.
What it does now (well, in the dev version), is evaluate the whole comment for various rules you can set. Here, I added a keyword regex filter
(words|phrases)and applied it to the "Lemmy Apps" group.This is how your comment shows up when it hit on those keywords:
When content is filtered, I don't even let it show the creator (because sometimes you just see a name and you know it's gonna be something braindead lol).
So I feel like that takes care of the "entire comment" portion of your idea (or at least that's as far as I'd want to implement it). If the comment hit on any other policy rules, those would also show up in the list you see.
For the replacement text, I'm taking WizardBeard's advice (below) and would somehow visibly identify that the original text has been modified by a user preference. Not sure how, exactly, I would do that. Maybe strike-through the original text and insert the replacement string italicized, in a different/larger font, or something like that.
The only complication would be that the indicator method, whatever it may be, has to be valid markdown and, thus, could theoretically be something the original person could have said.
Filtering policy editor looks like this (this is scoped to a group, so the "Communities" tab at the top is hidden):
As for indicator, I think what I would prefer as a user is a little icon next to the edited indicator, and then the ability to view comment source (which is already a feature on many clients). Though that is not really addressing the problem very well, as people viewing the screenshot need to understand what the icon means.
I've got an indicator row between above the comment text and the username (shows things like "deleted by creator", "banned from community", etc"). I suppose that could indicate whether the item was altered by a user filter.
But now I'm having second thoughts about this whole idea. Originally, I felt validated because I had kicked the idea around already, at least as a joke. But now I'm remembering YPTB, Fedi-drama, and similar communities exist and there are frequent flyers there who have nothing better to do than present things out of context and stir shit up and how this would be like giving them a loaded weapon.
Lemme (re) think on this.