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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Newspapers change titles and content of existing posts all the time. There are bots that track this (at least for the big ones like NYT [0]). Bloggers can change content/title at any time. There are no web-wide rules that you must mention your changes and provide a log. Yet people still link to blogs and newspaper articles.

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

[2] https://polititweet.org/

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The biggest difference has to do with how Twitter has been used. Your retweets and likes show up on your profile and thus edits made to tweets may change what appears when someone looks at your profile. Unless they do it in some smarter way than most[0], this could personally devastating to folks because likes and retweets are viewed as endorsements (despite what some think).

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.

this could personally devastating to folks because likes and retweets are viewed as endorsements (despite what some think)

Good. Maybe people should spend a moment figuring out whether the person they're retweeting is an asshole before giving power to their voice.

What if they're not an asshole but their account gets hacked by one?

Or it's a case of the worst person you know making an excellent point.

I'm not sure how this is good for Twitter, though, so not really a reason for them to implement editing.

I think you're missing the point.

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.

As an example of unintended consequences, viral tweets are often embedded on articles. Editing them via an account takeover or rogue Twitter apps (if not handled correctly) would lead to a lot of crypto ads reaching Buzzfeed.

This will absolutely be a self-own by Twitter: publishers will switch to screenshots rather than risk inadvertently showing Goatse to their audience.

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.

I wish there was an npm library that made an entirely self-contained SVG from a tweet.

I agree that's the real challenge, but it seems pretty doable.

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.

And maybe even more commonly on Twitter I just see people taking screenshots of tweets.

Screenshots of tweets seems like the worst way to "archive" them, since the screenshot can be trivially faked.

Why even go to the effort to fake/edit a screenshot, when you can just fake the tweet directly.... /s

https://shashiirk.github.io/fake-tweet-generator/

This - or plain browser dev tools - is how screenshots are faked.

even better if twitter itself has a feature where it shows a tweet's edit history

I assume twitter will absolutely show a 'this tweet has been edited' button that brings up all the revisions of it, opens itself up to too much bait and switch nonsense otherwise.

This has been edited maybe, history doubtful.

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.

The fact that users don't want their edit history visible is precisely why making it visible would be a useful tradeoff. Sure, you can fix your mistakes — but you have to balance whether the fix is worth sending up a flag (e.g. "This tweet has been edited") that may draw even more attention and scrutiny to the original tweet.

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...

The edit should just not affect existing likes & retweets?

i.e. more like a built-in 'delete and re-post', but with preserved metrics.

That wouldn't affect embeds, which is where a lot of abuse would likely come from.

Why couldn't it?

I think Reddit gets this right and Facebook Groups gets this wrong:

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.

> Newspapers change titles and content of existing posts all the time.

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.

It's really amusing when the URL is something like cats_are_better_than_dogs_science_shows and the article has been updated to be titled "Study shows dogs, cats basically the same".

>Newspapers change titles and content of existing posts all the time.

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.

It's entirely different though, you can't compare short form to long form journalism. Twitter is a real time item platform, things happen in an instant. Most people don't even know that NYTs changes stories and it's actually a big deal that they do and that they are generally not transparent about it, which is why such third parties do track it. An edit button on Twitter is a horrible idea. If they do it, they better put a time limit on it, that's 30 seconds to a minute.

I think the problem with Twitter is that it's built around retweets and response tweets. But if the thing you are responding to upstream can change it creates an issue where something can change after it's been broadcast and retweeted all over the place.

One of my favorite jokes on Reddit is "Ask Me A Question, Then Edit Your Question To Make Me Look Like A Jerk"

https://www.boredpanda.com/people-edit-original-questions-an...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/fo6pki/ask_me_a_q...

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