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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

I said it on the original story, and I'll say it again here: No one is surprised that security at twitter is a shit show. We all know that it's a disaster zone. It's a tech company that somehow managed to add nothing of value for almost a decade. It's 2013, the company just IPO'd, people are suggesting an edit button. It's 2022, twitter is releasing a limited experimental roll out of the edit button for it's 7 paid subscribers.

So yeah, no shit it's dysfunctional, and insecure, and bad in a million different ways. The fear with facebook is that these incredibly smart, motivated, amoral monsters are going to figure out how to drip dopamine into our brains to manipulate us into destroying western democrcacy so they can advertise more sneakers. The fear with Twitter is that someone trips over the wrong cable and the entire site goes down and never comes back.

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>people are suggesting an edit button

And those people should've been ignored. I feel like I'm the only person who actually used twitter back then and still remembers its original purpose. The restrictive character limit and lack of editing were deliberate features.

The reason they're adding an edit button now is the same reason they relaxed other deliberate restrictions before: money.

I've always wanted an edit button and I don't think it detracts from the "model" of twitter. Like GitHub, it should let you look at edit history though, because there are certainly interesting (and potentially terrible) implications to letting people edit stuff after the fact.

>it should let you look at edit history though, because there are certainly interesting (and potentially terrible) implications to letting people edit stuff after the fact.

It won't though, I think we all know that. The only way it can work is if editing is restricted to within a few minutes of the tweet being posted.

I can already imagine the drama and awkward situations that will inevitably arise from things like editing tweets in response to replies.

An even more explicit version would be showing something like Microsoft Word's comparison review, with red strikethrough for removed text.

It does not contradict anything you said, just want to add IIRC the character limit of 140 characters was a limitation of sms (that they embraced). At the time there was all this talk about real time/streaming platforms. Someone at an event could post on twitter via sms and break the news first.

You've never tweeted something, it got some attention, and then you realized there is a blatant misspelling in it?

EDIT: Misspelled blatant

>The fear with Twitter is that someone trips over the wrong cable and the entire site goes down and never comes back.

I'm not sure 'fear' is the right word there.

Does anyone even like twitter? :)

This article is like someone telling us that a burning trainwreck is actually not very good thing.

Anticipation is high. relief even.

Yeah GP just casually described a Utopian ideal.

Do you think software that changes more often is more secure? Seems backwards.

> add nothing of value for almost a decade

To have one stagnant social media company which offers you basically the same experience for 10 years has to be a defining feature. Everything else seems to change beyond recognition trying to clone whatever the new fad is.

Twitter has had stability and given users basically the experience they wanted. In any sane world the fact they can't grow a further 10x or morph into the next media juggernaut wouldn't matter if they have hundreds of millions of users who like their platform.

> The fear with Twitter is that someone trips over the wrong cable and the entire site goes down and never comes back.

They just need to send someone over to the maintenance shed and reset a few tripped breakers... what could go wrong?

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