Lack of edits is an important anti-abuse feature. If you can edit a tweet, you can make a tweet saying one thing, and then edit it to say something entirely different after someone else retweets, links, or embeds it elsewhere..

(Though frankly, given how poorly they've handled other abuse-related issues, I doubt this is their reasoning)

I don't see why edit couldn't save the previous tweet and make it accessible from the edited one. That way you can link to the original if someone said something they're now trying to obscure. The replies could also be linked to the tweet they were replying to.

That's why people are attracted to Twitter: it's live. You get Twitter in real time, and you can't un-say what's been said. Even when people try, readers make screen caps. Typos and other mistakes just scroll past; readers have already moved on. They're still accessible, because the Internet never forgets, but it only retains focus when you've monumentally screwed up -- and even then only briefly.

It's that living-in-the-moment feeling that has kept Twitter alive to this point, and if anything takes it down, it'll be by something that manages to be even harder to edit. Perhaps a live feed directly from your keyboard, or your mouth, or your camera -- or brain.

If you don't want to participate in that, you stay off Twitter. I find it bizarre myself. I like to get my moment-to-moment experience from what's in front of my face. But that's very limiting, and a lot of people seem to prefer the stream of consciousness from the entire rest of the world.

That seems like a stretch. You can delete erroneous posts, reply to your own erroneous posts with corrections, or retweet with corrections.

It's not like there's no way to correct yourself, you just need to be a bit more deliberate. It also arguably causes people to be a bit more conscious of what they're saying before they post too.

What, because of no edit function?

Immutability