It's a leftover from reddit. A comment would be marked as "edited" if you changed anything after posting it, and since some people are shitheads and change their comments to say completely different things after people have already replied to them it's just a way to inform people that the edit you made to your comment was just to fix typos and not anything significant

In my opinion it's not useless at all. Lemmy marks the comments as edited, but that's just to show the fact that it was edited. But if you add the reason why you edited, that makes it a whole lot more transparent.

Sometimes it could happen that I see a great comment full of great ideas from a great user, and it could be lengthy as well. Then later I go back to see the reactions, and I see the comment was edited. If I don't know what was edited on it, then I have to read the whole comment again. But if it's clearly stated that only typos were fixed, then I don't bother with re-reading the comment.

It is not worthless, it tells you that the post was edited and that the author didn't try to hide it.

I'd rather have it be known why I've edited my message, rather than leave people to question if I'd edited the body or meaning of my message. In my case it's an accredited science lab thing, but I imagine lots of corporate and legal professionals do the same.

As long as as you don't use ETA as an abbreviation for "edited to add", you are ok. That shit was suddenly everywhere on reddit, god darn kids and them fancy ambiguous acronyms!!! shakes fist at clouds

I never say why I edit my comments and no one ever asked me.

Whoever asks me why I edited this comment eats farts for breakfast.

Sometimes I don't want to say "edit: my fat thumbs typed 'thumps' instead of 'thumbs' " but I don't want anyone to assume foul play when they see my comment has been edited.

Because if somebody pointed out a spelling error, you aren't making them look like the idiot.

I wish there was a time allowance for editing comments without showing that the comment was edited. Something like 30 seconds would be enough to correct a misspelled or missing word. Most of my comments that are marked as edited are simple typos that I edit within a few seconds of posting them.

I hate people that edit stuff

Edit: because my social anxiety leaks into text and I have a desperate need to over share and over explain so people don't mistake my thought or meaning.

I know it's a lot more complexity, but I wish we just had edit history for everything. You edited your comment? Easy enough for someone to go back and see that you didn't change your meaning. You changed your opinion? Edit your post's content and people will still know the context of the replies.

Edit: Just to completely change the whole meaning of the post to make people who responded to me look like assholes.

I still prefer when people do that if it after people already replied. Especially if those typos were significant enough to cause misunderstandings. The whole chain just becomes confusing if you fix them without any edit log.

Back in the early days of Reddit if you edited something it was marked as such, but people didn’t know what you edited. So, as a courtesy, you explained your edit.

Lots of platforms now have an ‘edited’ notification so it’s still common to leave the ‘E:’ comment.