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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Do you think HTML pages should be uneditable after a period of time? Regardless of your opinion there (since I can see the merits), the rest of the web isn't exactly founded on immutability.

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But Twitter doesn’t want to be just another webpage. Tweets and its dates are used in court and by historians. That’s basically why Twitter has been hesitant to allow edits.

I kinda wish they let people add some text instead of allowing editing, like:

    Wouldnt it be nice?

    Added: * wouldn’t

I know deletions are still allowed, but they don’t lead to different content.

I'm sure that web pages and their dates are used in court and by historians.

The web has archive.org for that. Or, ‘download webpage’ from a browser.

Archive.org works on twitter too?

> Archive.org works on twitter too?

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.

Is it Twitter's responsibility to be an accurate archive for courts and historians?

It’s not the responsibility, but if you read their post it’s obviously their concern.

I see the argument, though. Edits in a conversation break context and flow.

HN has edits, in conversation and flow, and it does break sometimes, but in general it's a good.

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".

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