Should there be a pencil in edited comments?

Question

There is a pencil after edited comments. It made me even to ask a non-sense question, as I thought it would permit me to edit the comment.

I only noticed it was a way to indicate the comment had been edited when I leaved the mouse over it enough time to display its tooltip.

It seems to me it does not a great value to the reader about knowing whether the comment was edited or not; and even serves to confuse him/her. My suggestion is to remove it, or to draw a different icon.

May be orienting the pencil tip towards top would not make users think it is a edit button.

What do you think?

Answer 1

The pencil shows that the comment has been edited, not that it is editable.

If you can edit a comment there will be an "edit" link visible at the end after the time stamp.

Answer 2

It seems to me it does not a great value to the reader about knowing whether the comment was edited or not

I disagree: while there is a short (five minute) window to edit comments, I have seen a chain of comments show up quickly with edits.

Example: user A leaves a comment, user B replies to the first comment, then user A edits the first comment.

Now the second comment might be replying to something completely different due to the edit. It helps the reader to understand if the record of the conversation changed.

If anything, I would leave the current functionality as-is and add a thin separator in between comments where there are deleted comments (maybe the same pink background for deleted posts but as thin as an HTML separator). This would provide even more context for comment chains that edited or deleted comments.