> Dorsey was unusually direct: “The answer is no,” he says.
> “The reason there's no edit button [and] there hasn't been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS text messaging service," explains Dorsey. "So as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”
I respect the decision itself if he's trying to uphold a certain feel—but "preserving the vibe of SMS" is pretty weak as far as justifications go.
But it is not the reason Jack gave.
> Though Twitter has evolved since its SMS days, Dorsey says the static, uneditable nature of posts remains an integral aspect of the platform, as it allows users to retweet and quote tweet others freely without fear that the message they amplified or critiqued could later be altered.
Bingo, that's exactly what Twitter Engineers have stated in the past. Example:
https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...
a) You're constraining the time-to-edit b) You're constrained to a single edit
But it could be a lot of work to ensure that it's a consistent experience since you'd have to untangle the "cache this thing for-literally-ever" expectations that may exist.
This isn't as simple as counting the number of changed characters, especially when you have to consider at least dozens, better hundreds, of languages.
But then again you can already cram about ten times as much meaning into a single tweet if you write in Chinese or Japanese, so maybe they just don't care.
I feel like GitHub already solved that problem by showing an edit history on comments. Twitter could do the same thing.
Even easier: don't actually publish tweets for 60 seconds, during which time they can be edited.
The speed Twitter moves I think a lot more people are going to mash the retweet button than the “see edits” button.
(You could also extend this to allowing the annotation to be added to a run of text and shove it in the entities object for extra clarity / highlighting.)
Plus, having the strikethru + new_text visibly highlighted could enable whole new formats of jokes
Imagine - a $4/m edit button. What a joke.
Given Twitters toxicity it should probably be done with a huge mark "this tweet has changed" and an option to see previous versions just be not be abused.
The other is a hellpit to see who can out-victim and out-woke each other.
You can do some of this with third party tools, but it'd be nice to have it built in. I stopped liking Tweets though because it's actually impossible to remove more than 3k old likes. I was eventually able to do so, but it required contacting their DPO office and having them reset the cache each time so I could remove them in batches (entire process of reaching out, getting a response, and iterating took 6weeks-ish).
Limiting quote-tweets would also help people since most of the abuse comes from quote-tweeting rather than replies (which you can already limit).
I'm not twitter famous so I mostly only experience the good aspects of twitter.
If you have a highly curated feed and make an effort to interact pleasantly with in-good-faith people it can be a really great place. It requires aggressive blocking and intentionally not following hostile people though. Some better blocking tools would probably also be helpful (block everyone who liked this tweet, etc.)
I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay $10/month for no ads.
It's cool they have the culture to ship something big like this and decide to pivot - I think that's a pretty good sign.
1. Bookmark instead of liking tweet if info is worth coming back to.
2. Retweet if I totally agree and want to share my view with my followers
3. Add people to different curated lists instead of following them.
Twitter has some excellent feed curation tools but not many people are aware about them.
tweetdeck.twitter.com is their first-party client that doesn't have ads (and also gives you an actual chronological feed and some other niceties).
Interestingly, it also never implemented Fleets.
It'd be more efficient to have a twitter mode where you can only ever tweet, and not read anything other people tweet.
I'm guessing this is primarily snark, but there are a lot of tweets that are pretty good signal of bad behavior. I'm not talking about some nuanced difference in opinion. For the tweets I'm talking about knocking out everyone that liked it wouldn't be a big deal.
Sure some may use this to craft an echo chamber for themselves, but they're already doing that anyway - and a lot of people 'hate follow' to stir up abuse intentionally to drive traffic. These people wouldn't find this tool valuable because they feed off of the nastiness to drive engagement and grow their audience.
Have they, like, asked people?
Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the comfortable lurker?
It's like the inverse of reddit: reddit has a very high Alexa score yet is invisible in the public media; Twitter is discussed endlessly by the nattering nabobs, called before congress etc, yet has trouble monetizing their infamy.
For Twitter I didn't see the use, though posting a Fleet does bother people less than spamming, they're too hard to make without ending up ugly.
I'd rather see a change where the search doesn't let you stalk random people by searching for what they posted 3 years ago…
Almost like applying a GPT-3 editor to spice up my tweets. I type X tweet and then use GPT-3 or something like that to modify my words/sentences to have more of a Shakespeare or Steve Jobs voice to it.
edit looks as if I found an experiment with GPT-3 to do exactly this: https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1287050253103968257...
EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.
There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today.
Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there.
With social media, the only way to win is not to play.
The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook.
A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing.
Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...
Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy tweets.
"I don't think like that any more, that's why I deleted the tweet" is a good defence IMO.
But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's an enormous risk for normal people.
the long searchable record is certainly convenient for digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.
A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a publication of record with your name and face attached to it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years ago learned that lesson the hard way.
and there's the problem.
like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect its power and follow some basic safety rules.
Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button.
In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your full name and face attached to it. It has the potential to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on it for the rest of your professional life. So tread carefully.
as for your third point, undocumented public speech (no audio or video recordings and no effective note taking) is vastly different from creating public documents (anything on the open internet).
Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".
I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or implying anything negative about minorities.
I’d consider something like this life ruining:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/03/29/adam-smith-c...
A mean spirited yet relatively insignificant video berating a low level employee for the company/owners bigoted views. The guy ends up losing his job and allegedly can’t get another job for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg-jzlWcc0E
Dude outed himself as a massive shitbag, so I'm going to lean on the side of "he deserved it". What has he done to redeem himself since then? The name makes it pretty hard to search for updates.
The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.
> in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes
That's a baseless statement. I would argue that caring about getting votes means he cared about trying to actually help the movement capitalize on its energy at a critical moment. Right or wrong, if people can't even discuss data-driven strategies for your movement without being shamed and ostracized, your movement is dead in the water.
Who do you think was properly fired/ostracized for tweets?
Are you kidding? This is an incredibly opaque and user-hostile company.
edit: I am one of the moderators of /r/Twitter on Reddit. Come look at my subreddit if you want a feel for where my opinion is being drawn from. This company is in absolutely no way transparent.
That makes sense in retrospect. I have a twitter account but have only used it a handful of times when it was the only way to complain to a company (!). I read tweets only when someone links to them.
Perhaps something even more lightweight would have attracted me but I'd never even heard of this product.
It's a difficult problem to publicize an addition to a service to those non-users who aren't actively looking for features.
Every failure we can learn from is one which we can avoid for our self. Hence in the startup ecosystem, 'What not to do' is more valuable than 'What to do' but those who are new to the game flock to those selling the latter because 'they tell what one wants to hear'.
The recent #buildinpublic trend is showing some promise. I started my first buildinpublic project recently, A platform to validate minimum viable product but it failed the meta validation and I've detailed the reasons in the twitter thread[1].
But I've noticed that much of the building in public ecosystem is focused upon nocode, Especially flooded with notion related projects. I haven't used it, But I presume the reason is because majority of the people who are watching the #buildinpublic threads are non-coders and are looking to learn how a project is built.
[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/13994004552858542...
>Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others. We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.
It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. They didn't have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a nice touch.