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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

>1) actually just letting people pay to get rid of ads + see content in chronological order without other bullshit

It can't because the people most likely to pay are also the ones worth the most to advertisers. Thus you need to charge more to make up for it, thus selecting for even more valuable people, etc, etc.

>2) allowing users to edit tweets which people have been begging for for years.

Due to the high possibility for abuse either by users or people taking over their accounts this is unlikely unless it resets all metrics on the tweet. At which point you may as well make a new tweet. Same reason you can't edit the title of a reddit post.

View on HN

Oh, come on, there are plenty of reasonable solutions to both of those, such as:

1) If you need to set the price high to avoid that effect, just set it high.

2) Add an “edited” tag (just like HN does). For replies that and retweets that came in before the edit, maybe have an easy way to show the original version.

Or, 2b) Show the edited version literally as an edit, with the typos crossed out.

>1) If you need to set the price high to avoid that effect, just set it high.

You missed my point, there is possibly no price high enough. The higher the price the more valuable the users who pay it are to advertisers. Thus the price needs to be even higher and endlessly up it goes.

>2) Add an “edited” tag (just like HN does)

HN does not allow the changing of headlines either except by admins. Arguably headlines are closer to tweets than comments.

The higher the price the more valuable the users who pay it are to advertisers. Thus the price needs to be even higher and endlessly up it goes.

Well, the price is higher for an ever-smaller set of users! It’s a demand curve - in principle you can pick a point where cost $C x N users is worth more than the loss of advertising revenue from those users.

Arguably headlines are closer to tweets than comments.

I’d argue the opposite!

As a compromise -- how about links on Twitter are similar to HN headlines?

HN does not have an edited tag and doesn't allow editing past a brief window (for both headlines and comments). Ones that are edited are invisibly edited: there's no notification that they have been, unless someone points it out. You are wrong and your idea is so awful that I struggle to think of an idea that could be more destructive to discussion quality, especially on a site that already has a low standard of discussion like twitter.

I edited this comment multiple times. No edit tag.

HN does not have an edited tag

Huh, wow! Somehow I had the idea that it did. I might be mixing it up with some other forum, or the edit to add: tag that many people here add manually.

and doesn't allow editing past a brief window

Right, that’s precisely the kind of obvious balancing restriction I was alluding to, by mentioning HN at all.

your idea is so awful that I struggle to think of an idea that could be more destructive to discussion quality

I’m going to need a bit more justification for that one than “your example of existing usage was incorrect”. Care to expand?

Why does HN allow edits at all?

Edit to add(!): I’m glad I was able to fix an unbalanced *

You're thinking of Facebook, which has an "edited" tag on comments on posts as well as a full edit history if you click on it.

I think Twitter could allow a 60-120 second edit window without being ripe for abuse that an indefinite edit window would allow.

Slack does too, if that matters

I don't see why you couldn't keep all versions of a tweet to browse (and allow direct linking to) but just display the most recent with a "This tweet has been modified link" that displays the revisions.

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