When should you avoid editing a post (e.g., to change the story after feedback)?

There are several situations where editing a post would be inappropriate, even though the technical option remains available. The clearest case is retroactively altering the core claim, story, or question after comments reveal that the original version generated reactions you did not anticipate or dislike. This practice is sometimes called "moving the goalposts" and is one of the most reliable ways to lose credibility on Reddit. A concrete example: you post a personal story framing yourself as a victim of someone else's behavior. Commenters respond with criticism pointing out that your own actions contributed to the situation. Quietly editing the post to remove or soften the details that attracted criticism — without noting the change — is deceptive. The existing comments, which responded to the original version, now appear contextless or misguided to new readers. The people who wrote those comments were acting in good faith and are now made to look foolish through no fault of their own. Similarly, do not edit a post to claim you predicted something correctly after the fact, or to insert information that would have been relevant to early commenters but was conveniently absent from the original. These edits may be subtle, but experienced community members who read the original post will notice and are likely to call it out. Posts that have been widely discussed, heavily upvoted, or cited in other threads carry a particular obligation to stability. When a post is part of the record — when people have linked to it, discussed it on other platforms, or saved it as a reference — unilateral substantive changes without clear notation disrupt that record. In these cases, the appropriate approach is to add a clearly marked update note below the original text rather than altering the original content at all, preserving the historical accuracy of the discussion that followed it.