I mean it's not an insurmountable problem though. As long as likes and RTs are tied to a specific version of a Tweet and you can see the edits and associated likes it's fine.

Even setting aside the UX issues in this, I think this is underestimating the complexity. I don't know anything about Twitters infrastructure but obviously we are not talking about a single postgres instance here. Effectively turning every tweet into a linked list with connected retweets, likes etc. is a significant data model change for a system of this scale.

For now let's just add a "*" to the original post to give all the retweeters deniability. I'd bet 99% of edits are for grammar/spelling/readability.

That just makes it even more confusing. So you edit your tweet, but all the people who retweeted are still showing the wrong version and you can't do anything about it.

It kind of makes the situation worse than it is now.

It's not the "wrong" version. It's the original version, as per when they quoted it. There's really no other way it could work.

When you quote someone, you repeat what they said, not what they might repeat some time in the future. When you quote a book, you write down what's written in the book. Not what the author writes in the next edition.

You may in time edit/remove/amend your tweet to comment on further changes.

This is a particularly low-tier way to troll on Reddit. It doesn’t seem like the problem is drastic there, or even here on HN. I think the problem does stem from a retweet having a vibe of “I endorse this message.”, regardless of what the retweeter has written in their bio.

> I think the problem does stem from a retweet having a vibe of “I endorse this message.”, regardless of what the retweeter has written in their bio.

At the very least, a retweet always means "I want more people to see this message".

Since Twitter has effectively moved the default away from chronological order, what is really the purpose of a retweet? An upvote is naturally a positive interaction for “suggested tweets my followers should see”

Retweets still convey a tweet to your followers much more directly than a "like" does.

I see it occasionally on both platforms, but not very much. Usually it gets caught very quickly.

So keep the original message when you retweet. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable amount of conceptual complexity.

That just makes the feature weird and broken.

How?