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It has been noticed that when editing my own posts, that I sometimes get annoyed with a small wrong detail in a post that I then do a 5 character or less edit. Here is proof of this causing trouble for users:enter image description here

This was the moderator message to me about a post I edited. One solution is to prohibit any edits with 6 characters or less just as in the review queue. The post in the message is the top rated question on my main Math Stack Exchange profile page if you would like to see the edits there concerning tetration.

This is the same feature in the comments with one not being able to edit every 5 seconds and not after 5 minutes as to prevent spam of editing and editing after way past comment creation to unfairly update comments.

In short, for those unwanting to read the question, or large piece of text in this case, would be that, in summary, I find myself editing very little nuances and accidentally generating unwanted noise on the site.

One way to fix this form of “question exposure abuse” would be to not let users edit a post every few seconds or minutes, maybe every 5 to 120 seconds. The edits themselves I am proposing to mandatorily contain at least a few characters, maybe at least 4 to 10 characters, changes with line breaks, photos, and other “non-text” related edits counting as a character in edits.

This will not only stop any unneeded messages, such as mine, to be sent by the moderators, but also improve the relevance of questions and “slow down” the unwanted noise on this popular community. As always please give me feedback and correct me please!

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  • $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak. Why edit such a minor detail? Thanks anyways. $\endgroup$
    – Тyma Gaidash٠
    May 16, 2021 at 2:35
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    $\begingroup$ I find Martin's edit incredibly hillarious in the context of this post :) After an edit, there is a 5 minute (i think?) grace period. Small edits are OK and sometimes important (a minus sign can change everything). I do not know how many messages like this the mods send, but maybe not too many. So I disagree with the suggestion. The issue IMO is the number of edits (27) on a single answer over 9 separate days. It would be better if they were made in quick succession, and much better if 27 was a smaller number. (By the way, if you ever make the 28th edit, use \ln instead of ln). $\endgroup$
    – Calvin Khor
    May 16, 2021 at 5:48
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    $\begingroup$ 27 edits is more than enough to convince a skeptical user that you have no idea what you want to say. It's enough to convince a cynical user that you're willing to do anything to keep your answer visible on the front page, to gather more attention. You don't want users to come to either of those conclusions. That's why it's a good idea to get it right the first time, or the second, or maybe the third ... but, certainly, well before the 27th! $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    May 16, 2021 at 6:42
  • $\begingroup$ Yes you are all right. The edits were made because this answers was meant to be a fun project to see how I could keep adding information to grow the answer. Why does this answer have this many downvotes? I presume this is because of the bad feature request, or maybe the Meta has more net downvoted questions than the main page? $\endgroup$
    – Тyma Gaidash٠
    May 16, 2021 at 11:51
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    $\begingroup$ @TymaGaidash Do you mean downvotes on the answer your are discussing here, or downvotes on the question here? If you mean the question here, well: voting is different on Meta. The downvotes simply mean that people disagree with your suggestion. $\endgroup$
    – user1729
    May 16, 2021 at 13:19
  • $\begingroup$ @user1729 I mean the ones in this post. Also, does this mean that downvoting does not reduce the reputation points? $\endgroup$
    – Тyma Gaidash٠
    May 16, 2021 at 16:14
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    $\begingroup$ @Tyma Downvoting on meta does not affect reputation points. $\endgroup$
    – user1729
    May 16, 2021 at 17:11
  • $\begingroup$ More generally, nothing on Meta affects reputation points. $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    May 16, 2021 at 22:10
  • $\begingroup$ @GerryMyerson so it is more of a “free community” where one can speak their mind about the site mechanics? Why are people still commenting even when this question is answered to some extent? $\endgroup$
    – Тyma Gaidash٠
    May 16, 2021 at 22:13
  • $\begingroup$ I'm commenting because I think I have something useful to say. I can't speak for the other commenters (although quite possibly they feel the same way I do). $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    May 17, 2021 at 9:31
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    $\begingroup$ @GerryMyerson Then thank you for your input. I guess you did give me some useful advice for not over-editing with small edits. $\endgroup$
    – Тyma Gaidash٠
    May 17, 2021 at 11:37

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The core problem is over-editing. It is best addressed by self-control of those doing the editing not by technical hurdles that can get in the way of legitimate edits and also can be worked around.

The time-limit would need to be much longer to have any relevant impact. In a way it is better to have a couple edits within a few minutes than those edits spread out over some hours.

On the character limit, thus are you trying to tell us that you would not have made the change if there had been a character limit? That's not my observation in related scenarios. Usually users add some irrelevant change to get over the limit.

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