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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.
What other platform do we know of that needs an odit feature? Let me think... let me think...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
Another option is to show the final, edited tweet as the default, but then show what the original(s) was/were by clicking on a history button. That way everyone can present their intended content as the default (e.g. fixing typos or punctuation), but it won't let someone completely alter their content and meaning with the intent to deceive.
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"?
Highlight replies, retweets and likes that occur before any edit, so its obvious to observers without any interaction required that the reply, retweet or like was for a version other than the "All Jews must die!" a tweet was later edited to.
If an edit is substantial or (and here is one for all you machine learning junkies out there) changes the context of the tweet ("I like kittens" becomes "the Jews deserved the holocaust"), then perhaps also notify anyone who has interacted with that tweet by means of reply, retweet or like so they can review the edit and ensure they havent been misled.
You could tweet, "I love [some new movie]. Retweet if you agree! Then, after a bunch of retweets, edit it to say "Retweet this message if you eat other people's boogers!"
If the retweets would update, it could prove quite humorous for a day or two.
From an operational POV, I would hate going from an "everything is immutable; we only support insert and delete operations" to "mutate all the things and damn the caches!". It's an entirely different architecture. I can totally imagine the backend and ops teams saying sure, we can do this, as long as you understand it means we're launching a brand new platform.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
...is simply to be disconnected.
That way, all the people tweeting stupid shit can pretend the rest of the universe cared about their idiotic crap, but then we don't actually have to read it, and they are in fact safe from the logical consequences of their inane comments.
Everybody wins.
-Styopa