10 ms·

The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.

donohoe 10y ago
Agree. We've told them this directly for years. Whats next?
- buro9 10y ago
  Edit!
  - iKenshu 10y ago
    That should be nice, I need that option.
  - madsushi 10y ago
    Being able to edit something that someone has already retweeted seems ripe for abuse.
    - buro9 10y ago
      Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available. But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.
      - kstrauser 10y ago
        I think it's still ripe for abuse. Case 1: I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you. Case 2: I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit. --- From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.
        dragontamer 10y ago
        The original example is gamefaqs introduction of edits. What is your shoe size? 11 Then the question changes to an age related question. What is the ideal age of a prostitute?
        cynix 10y ago
        Fun fact: this particular example won't work in Japan, where typical shoe sizes are around 25–29.
        jacobush 10y ago
        But there the typical ... nah I won't go there.
        Ileca 10y ago
        I think it already happened with a troll baiting racists. He waited for a lot of RT then changed the source of the embedded racist picture with something like "I am a big disgusting stupid racist". Something like that. It was a good one, though.
      - ben_jones 10y ago
        Just imagine the gargantuan changes that could be necessary for small tweaks like that. Twitter was built on RoR originally, so it was probably a pretty standard relational model, then they did massive scaling for huge read/write loads, then they did massive scaling for real time features, god knows how hard it would be just to add a foreign key. I really, really, want to take a day and just go through all their engineering blogs after only glimpsing a few..
        teej 10y ago
        Honestly, if they only designed to scale and did not anticipate iterating on the product, they deserve to fail. My guess is that this not a trivial change but worth the effort.
        toomuchtodo 10y ago
        No one deserves to fail because of challenges they couldn't have anticipated in the future. We call that "learning".
  - krschultz 10y ago
    Edit seems much harder to implement. This basically adds some metadata to the Tweet model instead of embedding it within the body text. That's a change and it needs to be implemented all over, but it is pretty backwards compatible. It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated.
    - mgiannopoulos 10y ago
      Even Facebook has an edit feature for a long time now with a revision history of posts/comments. No issues of abuse. This isn't rocket science.
      - dec0dedab0de 10y ago
        Facebook has had abuse from pages that got likes, and then later changed their title and purpose.
        mgiannopoulos 10y ago
        You can do this on any social media though.
      - danso 10y ago
        Facebook posts aren't as public-facing by default. AFAIK there's no FB equivalent to the retweet, in that the content of a FB share is not quite the same as the relation between a retweet and the original tweet.
        mgiannopoulos 10y ago
        You can do a share with zero added text = retweet You can also do a share of a link post keeping "the original post"
    - riffic 10y ago
      Hashtags and @-replies could also theoretically be moved from the message body and into metadata fields.
  - tacone 10y ago
    That's a recipe for disaster. You don't edit SMS, why should you be able to edit tweets?
    - newjersey 10y ago
      Exactly! I'd say I am strongly against the ability to edit tweets. I'd even put it higher than the strict reverse chronological flow of tweets that I prize so much that I still allow Twitter to send me tweets by SMS.
    - caseysoftware 10y ago
      I can see the use case if it's a extremely short edit window.. something like 30-60s, basically to catch that stupid typo. That doesn't solve the abuse angles but it gives a much smaller opportunity for it to happen. Short of [mega star], few tweets see much favoriting/RTing in that window.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
return0 10y ago
Maybe they were still accounting for the tiny percentage of SMS users.
- bcherry 10y ago
  that's correct. don't know about today, but SMS users were still fairly substantial in 2011 when Twitter introduced native photo uploads. they wanted to be able to include the photo URL in the SMS.
qq66 10y ago
It's hard to blame them for that, though. They made a blog with a 140-character limit and it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Who knows what it will become if they fiddle with anything?
- return0 10y ago
  It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.
  - mattl 10y ago
    Microblog, but sure..
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues. I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter. Ironically, sometimes it's been for the better. But for every https://twitter.com/RabbiJason/status/728404847381204993 https://twitter.com/RabbiJason/status/728404847381204993 there is a https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/240462265680289792 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/24046226568028979... Sometimes you even get something like this: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464 https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464 Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters... Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?
downandout 10y ago
Imo, it shows that, like many of us, they don't really understand why Twitter became so popular. That being the case, they don't know what they can and cannot safely change.
- arielm 10y ago
  I think looking at it this way is a bit naive. While I agree that "attachments" shouldn't take up tweet text, the 140 character limit is a core component of the service. Call it a micro blog or a mass SMS, Twitter is 140 characters. That said, I think most comments are missing the point - having attachments not take up characters really won't make the service any more useful to the mainstream... That's the real problem in my opinion.
  - nickonline 10y ago
    I don't know, if you post a link as well as an image you're losing 24 characters from a 140 character limit. You lose just less than 20% of the characters available. I think a 20% increase is fairly substantial.
    - wastedhours 10y ago
      Especially considering most changes are pandering to brands, and this is a use case that we use a lot. (Whether Twitter is a useful channel aside...) extra space for copy will always go down well with the people paying the bills.
- vit05 10y ago
  To me, Twitter works because many people prefer to read 100 headlines and know a little about everything, than reading just a big essay. Have a variety of views, rather than just one. It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers (views).
  - ggggtez 10y ago
aaron695 10y ago
If its such a obvious model why not create another obvious model and make billions?
miseg 10y ago
Isn't that the difference between Facebook and Twitter? Twitter got stuck on their once-innovative features. Facebook is changing more quickly than people can keep track of.
devstack 10y ago
Do you think these moves can save what Twitter use to be once? I believe not. Twitter has lost the social game. They never pivoted when Facebook was making continuous efforts to slay them. And in that time, they lost a lot of their audience to SnapChat, Instagram, WhatsApp and many other apps.

donohoe 10y ago

Agree. We've told them this directly for years. Whats next?

buro9 10y ago
Edit!
- iKenshu 10y ago
  That should be nice, I need that option.
- madsushi 10y ago
  Being able to edit something that someone has already retweeted seems ripe for abuse.
  - buro9 10y ago
    Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available. But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.
    - kstrauser 10y ago
      I think it's still ripe for abuse. Case 1: I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you. Case 2: I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit. --- From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.
      - dragontamer 10y ago
        The original example is gamefaqs introduction of edits. What is your shoe size? 11 Then the question changes to an age related question. What is the ideal age of a prostitute?
        cynix 10y ago
        Fun fact: this particular example won't work in Japan, where typical shoe sizes are around 25–29.
        jacobush 10y ago
        But there the typical ... nah I won't go there.
      - Ileca 10y ago
        I think it already happened with a troll baiting racists. He waited for a lot of RT then changed the source of the embedded racist picture with something like "I am a big disgusting stupid racist". Something like that. It was a good one, though.
    - ben_jones 10y ago
      Just imagine the gargantuan changes that could be necessary for small tweaks like that. Twitter was built on RoR originally, so it was probably a pretty standard relational model, then they did massive scaling for huge read/write loads, then they did massive scaling for real time features, god knows how hard it would be just to add a foreign key. I really, really, want to take a day and just go through all their engineering blogs after only glimpsing a few..
      - teej 10y ago
        Honestly, if they only designed to scale and did not anticipate iterating on the product, they deserve to fail. My guess is that this not a trivial change but worth the effort.
        toomuchtodo 10y ago
        No one deserves to fail because of challenges they couldn't have anticipated in the future. We call that "learning".
- krschultz 10y ago
  Edit seems much harder to implement. This basically adds some metadata to the Tweet model instead of embedding it within the body text. That's a change and it needs to be implemented all over, but it is pretty backwards compatible. It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated.
  - mgiannopoulos 10y ago
    Even Facebook has an edit feature for a long time now with a revision history of posts/comments. No issues of abuse. This isn't rocket science.
    - dec0dedab0de 10y ago
      Facebook has had abuse from pages that got likes, and then later changed their title and purpose.
      - mgiannopoulos 10y ago
        You can do this on any social media though.
    - danso 10y ago
      Facebook posts aren't as public-facing by default. AFAIK there's no FB equivalent to the retweet, in that the content of a FB share is not quite the same as the relation between a retweet and the original tweet.
      - mgiannopoulos 10y ago
        You can do a share with zero added text = retweet You can also do a share of a link post keeping "the original post"
  - riffic 10y ago
    Hashtags and @-replies could also theoretically be moved from the message body and into metadata fields.
- tacone 10y ago
  That's a recipe for disaster. You don't edit SMS, why should you be able to edit tweets?
  - newjersey 10y ago
    Exactly! I'd say I am strongly against the ability to edit tweets. I'd even put it higher than the strict reverse chronological flow of tweets that I prize so much that I still allow Twitter to send me tweets by SMS.
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    I can see the use case if it's a extremely short edit window.. something like 30-60s, basically to catch that stupid typo. That doesn't solve the abuse angles but it gives a much smaller opportunity for it to happen. Short of [mega star], few tweets see much favoriting/RTing in that window.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

return0 10y ago

Maybe they were still accounting for the tiny percentage of SMS users.

bcherry 10y ago
that's correct. don't know about today, but SMS users were still fairly substantial in 2011 when Twitter introduced native photo uploads. they wanted to be able to include the photo URL in the SMS.

qq66 10y ago

It's hard to blame them for that, though. They made a blog with a 140-character limit and it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Who knows what it will become if they fiddle with anything?

return0 10y ago
It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.
- mattl 10y ago
  Microblog, but sure..
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues. I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter. Ironically, sometimes it's been for the better. But for every https://twitter.com/RabbiJason/status/728404847381204993 https://twitter.com/RabbiJason/status/728404847381204993 there is a https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/240462265680289792 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/24046226568028979... Sometimes you even get something like this: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464 https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464 Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters... Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?

downandout 10y ago

Imo, it shows that, like many of us, they don't really understand why Twitter became so popular. That being the case, they don't know what they can and cannot safely change.

arielm 10y ago
I think looking at it this way is a bit naive. While I agree that "attachments" shouldn't take up tweet text, the 140 character limit is a core component of the service. Call it a micro blog or a mass SMS, Twitter is 140 characters. That said, I think most comments are missing the point - having attachments not take up characters really won't make the service any more useful to the mainstream... That's the real problem in my opinion.
- nickonline 10y ago
  I don't know, if you post a link as well as an image you're losing 24 characters from a 140 character limit. You lose just less than 20% of the characters available. I think a 20% increase is fairly substantial.
  - wastedhours 10y ago
    Especially considering most changes are pandering to brands, and this is a use case that we use a lot. (Whether Twitter is a useful channel aside...) extra space for copy will always go down well with the people paying the bills.
vit05 10y ago
To me, Twitter works because many people prefer to read 100 headlines and know a little about everything, than reading just a big essay. Have a variety of views, rather than just one. It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers (views).
- ggggtez 10y ago

aaron695 10y ago

If its such a obvious model why not create another obvious model and make billions?

miseg 10y ago

Isn't that the difference between Facebook and Twitter? Twitter got stuck on their once-innovative features. Facebook is changing more quickly than people can keep track of.

devstack 10y ago

Do you think these moves can save what Twitter use to be once? I believe not. Twitter has lost the social game. They never pivoted when Facebook was making continuous efforts to slay them. And in that time, they lost a lot of their audience to SnapChat, Instagram, WhatsApp and many other apps.