Twitter is adding an edit button
theverge.com
theverge.com
There's also already Twitter username change trackers [1] and Twitter deleted post trackers [2].
And maybe even more commonly on Twitter I just see people taking screenshots of tweets.
So I don't see this being much bigger a deal for transparency. There'll just be new systems for tracking edits if archive.org and screenshots aren't good enough.
[0] https://twitter.com/nyt_diff
[1] https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1510985771343351818
They've done the user centric research & every user says they want to be able to change what they say online & escape their bad mistakes. The team has resounding data pushing them this direction. And it will be immensely immensely detrimental to the platform/service/medium.
It's like the "Hidden replies" feature [0]. Sure someone can maliciously use it to hide valid criticism. But in doing so, they're essentially doing a public curation of "these are the replies which really rankled me"
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/twitter-rolls-out-its-hide...
i.e. more like a built-in 'delete and re-post', but with preserved metrics.
Facebook Groups: member-visible changelog
Reddit: you can edit the comment within 3 minutes with no "edited" sticker, but after 3 minutes if you edit then the comment's timestamp gets an asterisk next to it.
In fact, launching with a headline that matches the URL, and waiting until the page gets scraped/indexed, in order to then start a series of A/B tests for narrative, ranking, clickability, etc is the de-facto process for news orgs.
They will also stand to benefit from this change more than your average shit-poster.
Screenshots of tweets seems like the worst way to "archive" them, since the screenshot can be trivially faked.
The second biggest difference is newspapers tend not to change the entire point of the article in their edits, and aren't out to troll their engaged audience.
0: ie show the edited content on the page alongside the previous version(s) with the same prominence and, most importantly, without having to click anything to show an old version.
ETA: typos.
Good. Maybe people should spend a moment figuring out whether the person they're retweeting is an asshole before giving power to their voice.
Sure, but I trust a newspaper to not swap their article out for something repulsive to troll people. I don't have that same trust in a random Twitter user.
https://www.boredpanda.com/people-edit-original-questions-an...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/fo6pki/ask_me_a_q...
You're talking about transparency, which is important, but it's not user experience. We know how to make edit buttons that have transparency, just have an 'Edited' link and make the edit log accessible. Easy. This is not an engineering problem.
The problem with the edit button is the abuse vector, what the low friction path is, the effect of the feature on the community, the whole user experience.
It wouldn't even be right to compare Facebook's edit feature to anything Twitter does, because the communities and the mediums are wildly different.
Free business idea to HN: create a WordPress plugin that autogenerates Twitter screenshots & includes the alt text for embedding. Perhaps the @picaso_me bot can grow into this niche.
For example, display added text in italics and deleted text in strikethrough. (Like some legislatures do: https://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislative-staff/res...)
And show this view by default, so that users must read through the old text when looking at the new text.
Things get more complicated with multiple edits to a single tweet. You could possibly extend the approach, or you could allow only one edit.
Or perhaps like Gmail: stores the message but doesn't send until a few minutes later, at which point it's no longer editable. This would be easier to implement.
Discussion forums have had edits forever; reddit famously lets you go and delete all your existing posts at anytime by replacing them with "edited by autodeleter9000".
I kinda wish they let people add some text instead of allowing editing, like:
Wouldnt it be nice?
Added: * wouldn’t
Maybe if you're a famous celebrity etc. but it's scraped mine 5 times since 2007 (and the "expand conversation" links don't work) and I promise you that it has been fairly active ever since I signed up.
Links and uploaded media should not be editable.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue-featu...
It took a while for them to add this. And amusingly, comments (including those opening issues and PRs) are a bit more like a wiki than personal comments—if you have the appropriate permissions, you can edit comments by others. For a long time you could do so with no visible record that it was done. Which is objectively terrible but was hilarious if you worked on a team with a good sense of humor and reasonable restraint.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/56cdgm/ama_im_really...
Better be sure about it before you roll that out, because there is no going back.
Maybe this will be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Twitter should do it. I don’t see people leaving Twitter because of this occasional inconvenience.
It seems like there is little upside for Twitter doing this, and there is potential for misuse. People are already used to how tweets work and are mostly satisfied.
I prefer knowing that something I already read (and potentially liked) will not be changed later. If the author wants to make a change, it is easy enough to delete and tweet again, or just reply to your own tweet saying “whoops, I left out this word” or whatever.
1. Copy the old tweet content
2. Delete the tweet
3. Start creating new the tweet (but not finalized)
4. Paste the content
5. Edit the content
6. Finalize the tweet (equivalent of Submit button)
VS
Edit will look like:
1. Press edit
2. Edit the content
3. Finalize (or Submit)
You can't stop allowing edits, and it will fundamentally change how the platform operates. I think it has a high potential for mis-use and abuse. Currently tweets are, if anything screen-shotted and edited. But if you have a link to the tweet itself, it operates as a source of truth.
I can't say I like this change.
On Reddit and HN it is also commonly considered etiquette to have append-only comments, writing "EDIT:" in front of the addition to make it clear to readers what is going on. Moreover, reddit indicates in the GUI that a comment has been edited, unless you do it very quickly. Kind of like a git commit, changing a comment that people have already read is considered undesirable.
Reddit also stopped allowing edits of post titles, because it was subject to too much abuse. Twitter is going to face similar problems.
Until it gets deleted, at which point only screenshots and archive sites *may* be available (or it's totally lost if no one thought to save it)
> “Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation,” he said. “Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.”
If they can add an edit button while achieving that objective, then it should be fine.
What people really want is not send tweets with typos and grammatical errors, so a good spell checker is what twitter should have built. At the very least they could have started with that, because that's something that is easy to launch and un-launch, unlike editable tweets (which has database-level implications because they will store the history of edits).
I don’t think such a change really matters at a company like Twitter. The problem is more about principle than technicalities.
But the amount of bellyaching over this by many is not because people want grammatical errors in their tweets but because it has the potential to totally alter how twitter is a primary source record of public statements, and words can be possibly changed over time and thus the connotation/dennotations of those statements can change. Given how much political discussion takes place on twitter and how much of it about how someone said something stupid, that could be a huge shift in the platform's usage.
Of course, this will only work if old tweets can't be edited. Can't imagine anyone being happy to have their Twitter embeds suddenly say something that they didn't before.
If Twitter doesn't implement this, it sounds like a great product to built a small SAAS around: blogs, newspapers, even governments often embed tweets so being able to embed without change, could be a sought after product.
* Do you reset the likes / retweets after an edit? If not, what happens if folks start selling the ‘edit’ on viral tweets?
* What happens if the original tweet violates the TOS but then the edited version does not? Does the original tweet in violation still get persisted? Does the edit get persisted?
You’re onto something. I’m pretty sure that’s going to happen if edits are not limited. We already see “wow this went viral, here’s a link to my album”
I assume they'll have to have things like version control, so all prior versions are readable for crowdsourced moderation, if not then that's a bad decision IMHO; some past decisions of theirs haven't been rational, and seem more fear based - so maybe they won't even have version control in the name of "privacy" - pretending that the person didn't previously said what they said, and that somehow it's deleted off the internet and everyone's memory if they delete the tweet.
I've seen lots of bad hot takes from Twitter users who have no idea how large systems like this are designed. Dumb stuff like "just do a SQL update" or "use React".
Now I don't know if Twitter will allow you to see the history of edits to tweets, including the original mistake, but I imagine most people won't be paying close attention to the history of tweet amendments, unless you have a large following and are under scrutiny always (think journalists etc).
Over the years of using Twitter I would routinely delete all my tweets, and start fresh. Tools like semi-ephemeral[0] are useful, but I am wary of apps that have permissions to read my data, so I eventually scrapped semi-ephemeral and settled for having no Twitter apps installed, because privacy.
Fleets were a cool idea and I would actually prefer ephemeral tweets over the ability to edit. I always liked the idea of disappearing messages, because you /will/ regret certain tweets, and I've lost count of how many times I've been genuinely embarrassed because of a tweet I made a year ago (or more!).
And anyone can always delete and retweet, too. The "problem" this solves is that narcissists measure their self-worth by tweet metrics and are desperate not to lose them.
It's not a coincidence that this is happening as Musk buys his way onto the Twitter board and riles up his followers about his first pet feature.
But as for the whole "3 days before he bought the shares" - He's been accumulating for far longer than that and even the CEO of Twitter mentioned they were in talks with Elon about being on the board "in recent weeks" [1]
With that said, yes it may be manufactured coincidence mostly driven by the new CEO change and not by Elon buying shares
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/05/elon-musk-spent-2point64-bil...
That gives me a strong feeling of "if you're paying us, we'll let you rewrite history."
This is dumb.
I just hope they just keep a complete change log of any edits.
Not a bad idea.
Another alternative, you get say 5 minutes to edit then it locks.
Then it's not different from status quo of deleting the tweet and rewriting it, is it?
I suppose the event of being amputated is appended to your life, but your original limb was deleted.
Am I missing something?
But, like FB, there needs to be a visible edit history and we need to know to what version of the post did people respond to.
I hope this new infusion of ownership and oversight brings fresh ideas to a service that has remained stagnant and is very risk averse.
Just an absolute clown show.
What reasons have you heard for why people want an edit option on Twitter?
I actually like that Twitter is somewhat immutable so I'm curious which scenarios are driving the pain points for people.
And if I RT a tweet that is later changed, will my RT change as well?
There has to be a easy way for users to see the tweet was edited, and see what the edits were.
Then we'd have a mess of likes and RTs, and it would be pretty important to know whether those people were interacting with the original tweet or an anodyne replacement.
1: https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1486696022516682752/photo/...
Does it really take over 4 months to make an edit button?
Also HN: Why does it take them so long to implement this, it's just a simple technical decision?
The fact that a tweet is immutable is likely an assumption running deep inside twitter's system. For a large enough system, I could totally see implementing something like this taking months, just from the cross-team overhead or schema migrations
December: VP approves initiative
January: PM assigned for initial research, weekly iterations on a product spec defining what considerations need to be accounted for
February: Engineering lead assigned and starts to scope out technical implications on various datastores, weekly meeting with teams affected to see what's possible/what implications will be
March: Engineering team established/actual work starts
April: Proof of concept ready, comms start
Yeah it's really easy to make a button that you can click. Oh you wanted it to do something?
Because we live in a hell world.
A feature like this has three main variables to figure out and any functional PM or company should be able to answer these questions and test the preferred options with users in a few weeks at most.
1) period of time a Tweet is editable for: a few mins or forever? As Tweets are retweeted by others and embeddable, making them editable for only a few minutes after they’re first posted seems like the best approach as users who are retweeting don’t want a Tweet to be able to be edited to have a very different meaning.
2) is the Tweet ‘live’ and able to be retweeted while it’s editable or is it only live after the Tweet is no longer able to be edited? I prefer the latter approach as it makes the implementation a lot easier and essentially maintains Twitter as it currently works.
3) how to indicate a Tweet has been edited - adding an “edit history” link to Tweets only if they’ve been edited and linking these to a page showing the edit history of the page URL in simple coloured diffs seems to answer this question.
On a more technical issue, no doubt much of Twitter's architecture (e.g. caching) has been built with the assumption that a tweet's content is immutable. I imagine that breaking that assumption impacts a lot of underlying systems.
* How do you show that a like, Retweet or reply was in response to an earlier version of a tweet that might be vastly different from the tweet you’re seeing now.
* Do you reset a tweet’s likes and retweets when it’s edited? If not, what’s the policy on selling the edit on a viral tweet?
* How many times can you edit?
* Are older edit versions persisted or deleted?
* What’s the policy on a tweet that violates the ToS and then is edited to not violate the ToS?
I’m sure there are more, but it does get complex at scale I’m sure.
For someone like Kanye, I’m sure that’s enough time to get pretty good traction.
Wouldn't that handicap Twitter as a source of breaking news? I suppose you could have a "Make live" button to skip the edit window, but that's what the site effectively has currently.
Also, I think people typically want to edit in response to something pointed out in a reply. Like if someone tweets "The Earth is crowded! 7 billion people and counting..." and in a reply someone links to https://www.census.gov/popclock/world and points out there are ~7.8B people, the author might want an Edit button to keep the intent of the Tweet, but clarify the info:. For example, revising it to say: "The Earth is crowded! 7.8 billion people and counting..." An edit button that disappears once the tweet goes live wouldn't address that problem.
Twitter? Adding an edit button is not exactly rocket science. Meanwhile at SpaceX...
edit: I liked your subtle edit below from "paid board seat" to "(ridiculously expensive) board seat". Strange to make it a negative to invest in a company you want to change, like other board members are allowed to invest for their board seats, but Elon isn't. If Twitter does good it will be lucrative, not expensive!