The glaring omission is a time limited typo edit window. Just ducking ship it already.

I wonder if there are technical issues here? It wouldn't be too surprising if "tweets are immutable" (and therefore safe to aggressively cache) is an assumption baked into a lot of their code.

It's not just technical. Jack doesn't want it. https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-wont-get-edit-tweet-...

> 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.”

But there is a delete button for tweets...

And tweets can be 280 characters.

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.

He did expressly state "vibe and feeling."

Edit hurts the vibe but delete doesn't?

Jack really is just a blithering idiot. There are plenty of reasons you could give for not adding this feature, but that one, that's probably the worst.

Why though? It's bad enough when online news sites edit their articles and a later version carries some different information with no or little hint that it was edited.

I mean, yes, that is one good argument for not having an edit button.

But it is not the reason Jack gave.

If you read the next paragraph in the article, he does say basically that.

> 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.

And that is vital. Retweets and quote tweets and replies just fall apart if the parent tweet can be freely edited. Time-limited typo fixing capability is one thing, arbitrary editing is quite another.

> It wouldn't be too surprising if "tweets are immutable" (and therefore safe to aggressively cache) is an assumption baked into a lot of their code

Bingo, that's exactly what Twitter Engineers have stated in the past. Example:

https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...

I could imagine that, though I think there are likely many efficient ways to implement immutable edits, especially if:

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.

I would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter.

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 would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter.

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.

Facebook already has similar edit functionality and I’m curious how many users click through to see the edits. I’ll be the number is not high.

The speed Twitter moves I think a lot more people are going to mash the retweet button than the “see edits” button.

Facebooks edit history is also hidden in grey text next to the timestamp. I bet putting a "This tweet has been edited" notice actually inline with the content would be effective.

Exactly my thought.

Also will all the retweets be edited as well or do you retweet a snapshot?

One place I used to frequent solved this by disallowing editing of the original content but allowing the author to add a small annotation after the fact. Doesn't really fix the "correcting typos directly" issue but does allow for clarifications, etc., without the possibility of changing the original meaning that people may have RT/QT/etc.

(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.)

Having a time where it's not actually posted would work fine but probably not be super effective: after all, you already have an unlimited amount of time to look at the message sitting on your screen before you actually send it. It's just often very hard to read your own writing for typos. Still it would be a step forward. You could even make it opt-in.

Haha, I swear every time I wish I could edit a tweet it's within 5 minutes after I post it. To be fair, at least with my incredibly limited followers, that's soon enough I can just delete it and post it again without losing too much engagement, but still. I'm just not patient enough to proof-read properly, apparently.

How about a preview then?

No one would actually look at that though. You need to cater to the masses or make it exceedingly obvious

It would make it easy to call out anything nefarious, though.

Instead of rendering it as hidden or even as an edit history, render it with an "inline diff" (using the kind of algorithm you see Wikipedia do, or GitHub within a line) as a cross-out of the old content and the next content next to it... changing a lot of text like that would be extremely noisy and obvious--to the point where it wouldn't accomplish any evil goal and would also just be generally discouraged by its nature--and yet would fully solve the vast majority of cases that we want to satisfy.

I don't think it needs to be that in-your-face. I believe an inline "this tweet has been edited" link to a revision history or diff would thwart most abuse.

I think it does need to be that in-your-face-obvious. people reading/responding quickly will often fail to check and edit link/button

Plus, having the strikethru + new_text visibly highlighted could enable whole new formats of jokes

They have! With Twitter Blue (Canada + Australia only, $4/month or something) you can edit tweets within a short window.

Imagine - a $4/m edit button. What a joke.

This is one of those cases where the actual feature isn't that hard to make, but it widely depends on what your vision is. If Twitters vision is that a tweet should remain an unchangeable representation of what you said, then it is not just a matter of shipping it.

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.

They did, like a month ago. You gotta pay for it though...

https://ibb.co/S6WNLvt

wut da duck?

It's a feature like Gmail Undo Send. The tweet remains unposted until the edit window has been exited.

Wondering if you can implement it as a redirect. Instead of editing the original, the tweet redirects to the modified version but the original still shows up as a quote tweet or as a reply (with all replies to the original tweet under that reply)

If only Twitter had a full time CEO. Look at the innovation pace coming out of Square.

One is a useful product people use every day, and earns money.

The other is a hellpit to see who can out-victim and out-woke each other.