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.