Tag Archive for: Context

Edit Tweets?

The CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has asked Twitter users what improvements that they want to see on the site in 2017. He has over 5,700 replies so far.

The most requested feature is to edit Tweets after you sent them, rather than having to delete and start over. This feature while is the most requested is also one that is most polarizing.

While Jack Dorsey agreed that a “form of edit is def needed” and that “the company is thinking a lot about it” – he suggests that anything more than a quick edit would require some sort of changelog (revision history) — yet this would cause all kinds of problems:

Other problems that revision history (or any kind of edit for that matter) would run into is that a user wouldn’t know who liked the tweet and which version of it. Say for example you post a tweet and it gets 100 likes and you change that tweet 3 times. How many of those 100 people liked which version of the tweet? Or a tweet could be changed entirely which would cause the company to lose and damage trust in their service. As news sites and individuals could change a few words and the whole context of the tweet would mean something else – and by ‘endorsing’ the original tweet and having it changed do they still ‘like’ the tweet or do they have to ‘like’ it again – as you can see a simple ‘edit’ button can open a lot of problems for Twitter!

Other ideas asked of Dorsey would be a way to introduce bookmarks of tweets so users can find their favorite of their most ‘liked’ tweets plus an improvement on eradicating bullying on the service – which Dorsey called Twitters ‘Main Priority’

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!