Slashdot Mirror
Jack Dorsey Says Twitter Needs An Edit Function (buzzfeed.com)
Twitter is considering an edit function for tweets. In a seemingly impromptu chat on his platform Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave hope to those who have long advocated for the feature, telling one user that "a form of edit is def needed" and another that an edit function is something the company is "thinking a lot about." From a report: The demand for an edit button has become something of a meme on Twitter. After seemingly every new Twitter product announcement, many of the platform's users respond with some form of "Yes, but still no edit button?" Meanwhile the feature has become standard in competing platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
There needs to be a time limit for editing tweets. Five minutes is good. This keeps someone from going back and changing what they said long after they said it.
There also needs to be a flag that tells people that the tweet was edited. This prevents modifying a tweet after people have already agreed with it, etc.
With no edit button, you have to *think* before you post, and own up to your mistakes. It isn't surprising that people are clamoring for edit.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
To be honest, I just couldn't resist the obvious tie-in joke. I'm actually fine without an edit button here on Slashdot. While I occasionally wish I could take back a dumb mistake I missed while proofreading, adding an edit feature also introduces a significant problem of replying to mutable content. Then to fix that, you have to add other hacks, like flags to show the post was edited, a history to show what was edited, notifying posters who replied in case the content changed, and so on. Ultimately, it's probably a lot more trouble than its worth.
Editing is even more problematic for a push service, as you mentioned, whether it's recalling e-mails or editing tweets.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I gave up wishing for an edit feature here before Twitter was even founded.
It's called "Preview" and if you don't use that opportunity to review and edit, then that's on you. Perhaps it would be easier for Twitter to support previewing than post-submit editing and make it an optional feature controlled by a profile setting.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .