Okay, I know we all laugh about how Tumblr used to let you edit other people’s posts in your own reblog of them.

But honestly I think it may have been kinda good for people’s critical thinking.

In the same way as how replies worked in newsgroups in the early 00's….

Which were basically like big multi-cc email conversations (and looked the same whether you got the posts by email or by going to a site like Yahoogroups).

So, “reblogging” and adding your own comments looked like it does in an email (a low-formatting email, not the current Gmail default which makes it hard to even SEE the words you’re replying to, but that’s another whole rant).

Anyway it looked like this:

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> mmmmm, Spock is so in love with Captain Kirk! :-) <3

What are you talking about, LOL? He’s in love with Nurse Chapel!

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And since the other person’s words are just text above your reply, OF COURSE you could’ve edited them, like so:

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> > mmmmm, Spock is so in love with Harry Mudd! :-) <3

> What are you talking about, LOL? He’s in love with the Horta!

Hahahaha… what are you BOTH going on about?

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But, nobody did that!

The most editing I ever saw anyone do to someone else’s words was shortening or paraphrasing for simplicity… and sometimes in a big and nuanced argument you’d get called out for that, because it can twist the context.

Nobody would do something like the above example, because it was just SO OBVIOUS that you could just go a few posts back in the thread and see what someone originally wrote.

You couldn’t do it to trick people… and you wouldn’t even really do it as a joke, because that would be like joking about something weird your friend said five minutes ago, when we were all in the room and SAW him say something that was 100% different from what you’re joking about. It would be a type of absurdist humor that I don’t think even Tumblr has reached in the present day.

But Tumblr HAS reached a point where we, in some cases, have an implicit trust in the user-interface which is really not that warranted.

And back when you could edit other people’s words in your own reblog of them– and people were aware of that fact– that trust at least SOMETIMES got challenged, to keep us thinking.

Twitter did worse, though, giving us all those years without being able to edit your OWN posts. Yeah, there was value in it, being able to prove what someone said and when. But people became so dependent on that proof that we still sometimes see posts on other sites, like here on Tumblr, getting attention for being prophetic when they were actually edited after the fact, because people no longer even consider the possibility of a post being edited.

I don’t have a solution for the problem. Just saying, the viewpoint of someone who entered online fandom in the 90’s and 00’s is a bit of a different perspective on this.