Feature request: Custom automatic comment replacements (lemmy.nz)

submitted 1 year ago by SatyrSack@quokk.au to c/lemmyapps@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] olorin99@kbin.earth 2 points 1 year ago

A feature that should be able to handle this will be in the next version of Interstellar. The feature proposal is here if you have any extra ideas/comments.

[+] admiralpatrick@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Me and the Interstellar devs are collaborating on a shared filter spec. Would love to loop you into that discussion if you’re interested. With a shared spec, users could share popular filters between different clients.

[-] SatyrSack@quokk.au 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I jokingly thought about adding something like that already.

Basically:

(^Paywall(ed)?)$ -> I'm going to contribute nothing to the discussion except whine that you didn't cater to my laziness and make my laziness everyone else's problem until someone else replies with an archive link I could have easily gotten myself

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.

[-] Mika@piefed.ca 0 points 11 months ago

The lengths you people want to go to roast instead of writing a bot that would provide archive links for paywalled articles.

[-] kungen@feddit.nu 0 points 1 year ago

Linking to paywalls with no substance is bad etiquette.

this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025

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