Comment by thedays | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thedays | Hacker News Reader

How long can a Twitter edit button take to develop, test, implement and rollout? Twitter claims to have been working on this since last year and it’s now April so they’ve already been working on this for 3+ months. It’s hard to understand how such a simple feature can take so long to implement for a company like Twitter which has 7,500 staff. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/numbe...

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.

Well, for one, not all 7500 of Twitter is working on this :P And this kind of thing is less “hey users which do you like?” and more “ok what would the worse trolls on Twitter do with this feature? How can we minimize misunderstandings while providing value? Should we ship an edit button or some other implementation?” These conversations take time.

Also:

* 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.

Yes - but most of these are only issues if you allow Tweets to be editable forever. If they’re only editable for a few mins after posting and are not live and able to be retweeted and embedded until the editing window has closed, then most of these issues can be avoided.

They’re smaller problems with smaller edit windows, but still need answers, testing an implementation even if the edit persists 60 seconds.

For someone like Kanye, I’m sure that’s enough time to get pretty good traction.

How would a Tweet get traction if it’s not live until the editing window is over?

Sorry, I missed the "not live" part.

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.

There's a ton of social aspects and impacts that have to be considered and tested, and I think you've only scratched the surface. An edit function would add a substantial amount of new UI/UX and interface elements. There are still Twitter features (Spaces, bookmarks, many of Twitter Blue's additions) that have been on the smartphone app for year(s) that are still inconsistent or half-baked on the web app (and sometimes vice versa). And there would have to be substantial additions/reworking to the API.

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.

This completely ignores the complexity of scale. For one given tweets up until now were immutable there are likely tons of systems with that assumption baked in that you now have to reevaluate/rework. Think caching layers and data storage. Do they need to store an audit history (I assume this requires a few different legal teams in different countries)? How does that scale? The picture is far bigger than the three main variables you mention.

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