We've suddenly turned a "simple" feature into something with potentially major architectural changes[0] on how retweeting works too, just in a few minutes here! I wonder what other dragons await the ... lucky ... engineers who will get to size this feature soon. ;)

[0] No idea how it works internally, but it would hardly surprise me if the lack of edit functionality caused early design decisions around stuff like this that would be pretty tough to unwind.

Edit has obvious options for misuse. Mitigating misuse might be complicated but that's no reason not to do it. The feature I've just described is not complicated. The feature might have architectural implications but resolving those is literally the job of software development teams (including design, PM, etc).

I think it's pathetic to say of a feature that it's too hard because there may be some complications or architecture changes. It's especially pathetic to say of a basic feature like edit which exists on other platforms and is obviously possible. This defeatist attitude is, no doubt, partially to blame for Twitter's inability to improve.

Just rewrite twitter as a simple github client. You could tag the version the person retweeted or liked. Since you don't mind the repository being public, you could actually use a free account.

As a not user of twitter, you really made me confirm my "no way, ever" stance, as far as the platform goes. With editing, as you describe it, enabled? "Absolutely not a fucking chance", is the most polite phrase i can think of. Imagine replying to me, me changing my reply, then you having to extra-click to wade through various re-writes i could manufacture.

Don’t forget that Twitter likes are also soft retweets.

When I follow you and you like a tweet from someone I don’t follow, the Twitter algorithm may show the tweet to me in my timeline, marked as “X liked this”, even several days later.

There’s a lot of interaction models built into Twitter that assume immutability.

They can instead add a link for "Original" in edited tweets. So everyone effortlessly see the latest update but if people see it controversial, they can click "Original" to see what it looked like when it was retweeted. The problem with likes still remains but eventually social contract might form that if tweet was editted you cannot harass people for retweeting or liking it.