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Twitter is adding an edit button
- luxuryballs 5y agoThis doesn’t seem worth it when you can just delete and start a fresh one, forget what problems might come of it, what is actually being gained here?
- skilled 5y agoAs long as we can see the original tweet, I don't see how it's a bad idea. Of course, this will only work if old tweets can't be edited. Can't imagine anyone being happy to have their Twitter embeds suddenly say something that they didn't before.
- berkes 5y agoAlternatively, an embed function could embed a specific version. If Twitter doesn't implement this, it sounds like a great product to built a small SAAS around: blogs, newspapers, even governments often embed tweets so being able to embed without change, could be a sought after product.
- silicon2401 5y agoI'm incredibly excited to see what changes Elon brings to twitter, if only for the entertainment value. His response to the CTO of facebook, "facebook gives me the willies", was hilarious
- jurassic 5y agoTwitter's announcement says they have been working on the Edit Button since last year. It has nothing to do with Elon's poll. Let's give credit where it's due.
- minton 5y agoOf course the work has nothing to do with Elon. However, it does seem like he lit a fire under them to get it done.
- anonymousab 5y agoIn what way does it seem like he had anything to do with this at all?
- hunterb123 5y agoNothing, it's just funny they decide to announce it directly after his poll. Maybe they rushed to make it clear he didn't have anything to do with it? Maybe it's just a coincidence. Neither way matters.
- saagarjha 5y agoHe didn’t.
- riffic 5y agoah, the great man theory gets applied to a gigantic, globally scaled and insanely complicated set of software services.
- hunterb123 5y ago> insanely complicated Twitter? Adding an edit button is not exactly rocket science. Meanwhile at SpaceX... edit: I liked your subtle edit below from "paid board seat" to "(ridiculously expensive) board seat". Strange to make it a negative to invest in a company you want to change, like other board members are allowed to invest for their board seats, but Elon isn't. If Twitter does good it will be lucrative, not expensive!
- riffic 5y agoMy point is to poke fun at the implication that any improvements made are solely the result of one investor who now has their (ridiculously expensive) board seat.
- barkerja 5y agoIt will be interesting to see how they address embeds, retweets, etc.
- nashashmi 5y agoIs this not already available for paid users?
- abledon 5y agoIs the 'edit' button feature actually a hard feature to implement in twitter (due to their scaling architecture)? I remember reading a passage in that "Designing Data Intensive Applications" that explained how their architecture was different if the account was say, a celebrity account which needed to push out to a lot of followers, or an account that had few followers and tweeted very little etc..
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mushyhammer 5y agoDifficulty was not the reason why it took so long. The excuse has been that they want tweets to be immutable, so you don’t share a tweet for it to be changed later.
- gonzo41 5y agoA soft edit would be good for this. You can edit 3 times, but revisions are kept.
- awb 5y agoStill some questions persist like: * Do you reset the likes / retweets after an edit? If not, what happens if folks start selling the ‘edit’ on viral tweets? * What happens if the original tweet violates the TOS but then the edited version does not? Does the original tweet in violation still get persisted? Does the edit get persisted?
- mushyhammer 5y ago> what happens if folks start selling the ‘edit’ You’re onto something. I’m pretty sure that’s going to happen if edits are not limited. We already see “wow this went viral, here’s a link to my album”
- loceng 5y ago
- wildpeaks 5y agoI hope it is going to be similar to editable comments on Github, with a dropdown to see older versions. Or perhaps like Gmail: stores the message but doesn't send until a few minutes later, at which point it's no longer editable. This would be easier to implement.
- dimillian 5y agoThis can and is already done by third party clients. Would be a very disapointing way to implement if done like that in the official client.
- mushyhammer 5y agoUnlike GitHub, tweets should not be editable forever. I think 5 minutes is reasonable. Even HN has an edit time limit. I hope they also limit how much you can tweets (even though, in reality, adding 4 characters (“not ”) is destructive enough.
- eatonphil 5y agoDo 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.
- nkozyra 5y agoI see the argument, though. Edits in a conversation break context and flow.
- bombcar 5y agoHN 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".
- mushyhammer 5y ago
- eatonphil 5y agoNewspapers change titles and content of existing posts all the time. There are bots that track this (at least for the big ones like NYT [0]). Bloggers can change content/title at any time. There are no web-wide rules that you must mention your changes and provide a log. Yet people still link to blogs and newspaper articles. There's also already Twitter username change trackers [1] and Twitter deleted post trackers [2]. And maybe even more commonly on Twitter I just see people taking screenshots of tweets. So I don't see this being much bigger a deal for transparency. There'll just be new systems for tracking edits if archive.org and screenshots aren't good enough. [0] https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff [1] https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1510985771343351818 https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1510985771343351818 [2] https://polititweet.org/ https://polititweet.org/
- gen_greyface 5y agoeven better if twitter itself has a feature where it shows a tweet's edit history
- llamataboot 5y agoI assume twitter will absolutely show a 'this tweet has been edited' button that brings up all the revisions of it, opens itself up to too much bait and switch nonsense otherwise.
- rektide 5y agoThis has been edited maybe, history doubtful. They've done the user centric research & every user says they want to be able to change what they say online & escape their bad mistakes. The team has resounding data pushing them this direction. And it will be immensely immensely detrimental to the platform/service/medium.
- danso 5y agoThe fact that users don't want their edit history visible is precisely why making it visible would be a useful tradeoff. Sure, you can fix your mistakes — but you have to balance whether the fix is worth sending up a flag (e.g. "This tweet has been edited") that may draw even more attention and scrutiny to the original tweet. It's like the "Hidden replies" feature [0]. Sure someone can maliciously use it to hide valid criticism. But in doing so, they're essentially doing a public curation of "these are the replies which really rankled me" [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/twitter-rolls-out-its-hide-replies-feature-to-all-users-worldwide/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/twitter-rolls-out-its-hide...
- Jyaif 5y agoI get "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" vibes from this. What people really want is not send tweets with typos and grammatical errors, so a good spell checker is what twitter should have built. At the very least they could have started with that, because that's something that is easy to launch and un-launch, unlike editable tweets (which has database-level implications because they will store the history of edits).
- mushyhammer 5y ago> which has database-level implications I don’t think such a change really matters at a company like Twitter. The problem is more about principle than technicalities.
- sdfgdf 5y ago
- fullshark 5y agoI don't think it's grammar errors that's at the root of this. I think it's more subtly irritation over a valid criticism of a tweet that's got exposure, and wanting to change wording to alter the tweet's connotation to address that criticism while still making the same point by and large.
- Jyaif 5y agoJudging by the number of comments suggesting to make comments "editable for only a few minutes after they’re first posted", I don't think that's right.
- fullshark 5y agoWell those people recognize the problem with letting people change their words indefinitely, but do see the value an edit button brings in fixing grammatical errors. A pretty reasonable feature I do admit. But the amount of bellyaching over this by many is not because people want grammatical errors in their tweets but because it has the potential to totally alter how twitter is a primary source record of public statements, and words can be possibly changed over time and thus the connotation/dennotations of those statements can change. Given how much political discussion takes place on twitter and how much of it about how someone said something stupid, that could be a huge shift in the platform's usage.
- saurik 5y agoThere was an amazing account on reddit for a while whose name was something like EditedToMakeYouLookStupid (that wasn't quite exactly it, though, I don't think) that would set up traps and then, well, edit their comment to make your response look stupid ;P.
- CyanDeparture 5y agoNot sure if Reddit links are allowed, but this is one of them that jumps to mind - https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/fo6pki/ask_me_a_question_then_edit_your_question_to_make/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/fo6pki/ask_me_a_q...
- awb 5y agoFunny. Has anyone done this on a celebrity AMA?
- spiffytech 5y agoA commenter asked Rick Astley to give this reply, then edited their comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/56cdgm/ama_im_really_rick_astley_i_swear_and_to/d8i933q/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/56cdgm/ama_im_really...
- dr_spicy 5y ago
- stavros 5y agoThis was linked from the sibling's link: https://www.reddit.com/r/amathenedit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/amathenedit/
- saagarjha 5y agoSounds like some untapped real estate for you to move into on Twitter ;)
- KSPAtlas 5y ago
- axg11 5y agoEdit, as a Twitter feature, has been weaponized. It's now a symbol of how Twitter has stagnated and failed to evolve into a more relevant (and potentially profitable) product. Even though it has been in the works for more than a year, once edits are launched many people will credit Elon for "shipping". The Twitter team would do well to launch this ASAP and mark that as a new chapter for Twitter.
- jeromegv 5y agoNobody will credit Elon for that.
- delecti 5y agoThe thread yesterday about Elon getting added to the board was full of people saying that Elon should push to get an "Edit" feature added and then leave. I would be astonished if people aren't already crediting Elon for this.
- overthemoon 5y agoThey are, in this very comments sections!
- meibo 5y agoElon actually tweeted out a "Do you want an edit button?" poll... He's definitely going to weaponize this for public opinion's sake. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1511143607385874434 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1511143607385874434
- axg11 5y agoMany people already have.
- jklinger410 5y agoYou might as well edit this comment to save face buddy. The overwhelming public opinion will credit this to Musk, even though it is not true. Because we live in a hell world.
- 5y ago
- userbinator 5y agoTwitter plans to begin testing the feature with Twitter Blue subscribers in “the coming months,” That gives me a strong feeling of "if you're paying us, we'll let you rewrite history."
- fortran77 5y agoI'm no longer going to retweet or like anything. Why take the chance endorsing something that can change later on such a public, influential forum?
- faridelnasire 5y agoWorking on the ability to edit a tweet "since last year". That's some pretty horrendous velocity...
- matyasrichter 5y agoIs it, though? It's not just about exposing an extra API endpoint which updates a DB row. There's definitely a lot of other business & technical design decisions to be made, such as retweets and quote tweets. "Since last year" could mean about six months, which doesn't sound that unreasonable for a pretty major feature (and one that gets a lot of press).
- binarymax 5y agoInfuriatingly they “announced” it on April 1st. Everyone thought it was a prank. And then even a product manager started another thread asking what people wanted and referenced the April 1st tweet so nobody could take him seriously. Just an absolute clown show.
- wjp3 5y agoSimilar to the Amazon Dash buttons announcement. I still couldn't believe it was a real thing...
- timcavel 5y ago
- incomingpain 5y agoThe fear of an edit button is that you quote someone saying you totally agree and then they edit it to say "Aborted babies taste great" or something absurd. I just hope they just keep a complete change log of any edits.
- francisofascii 5y agoHow about you lose any retweets or references to a tweet if an edit is made.
- incomingpain 5y ago>How about you lose any retweets or references to a tweet if an edit is made. Not a bad idea. Another alternative, you get say 5 minutes to edit then it locks.
- KoftaBob 5y agoNot a bad idea, or make it so a tweet isn't quotable/retweetable until the 5 minute edit grace period ends.
- GrinningFool 5y agoI don't think that'd work - a lot of what drives twitter traffic is the immediacy of the timeline. If you see a tweet and can't react to it, chances are you'll never see it again.
- fhrow4484 5y ago> How about you lose any retweets or references to a tweet if an edit is made Then it's not different from status quo of deleting the tweet and rewriting it, is it?
- francisofascii 5y agoWell, you don't have to rewrite it. You can edit it, and save.
- nobody0 5y agoBut life is append only.
- freediver 5y agoProfound.
- hunterb123 5y agoTell that to amputees I suppose the event of being amputated is appended to your life, but your original limb was deleted.
- basisword 5y agoI’ve never understood the constant calls for this. It feels like a meme more than a feature people really need. Is it that hard to proofread 140 characters? What other common use cases are there that don’t impact the conversation in replies?
- CharlesW 5y ago> It feels like a meme more than a feature people really need. And anyone can always delete and retweet, too. The "problem" this solves is that narcissists measure their self-worth by tweet metrics and are desperate not to lose them. It's not a coincidence that this is happening as Musk buys his way onto the Twitter board and riles up his followers about his first pet feature.
- unholiness 5y agoThey announced this 3 days before he bought the shares. Seems like a coincidence to me.
- InGoodFaith 5y agoTwitter says it's been working on it since last year. But as for the whole "3 days before he bought the shares" - He's been accumulating for far longer than that and even the CEO of Twitter mentioned they were in talks with Elon about being on the board "in recent weeks" [1] With that said, yes it may be manufactured coincidence mostly driven by the new CEO change and not by Elon buying shares 1: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/05/elon-musk-spent-2point64-billion-on-twitter-shares-so-far-this-year-new-filing-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/05/elon-musk-spent-2point64-bil...
- pxeger1 5y agoIt's 280 now
- soheil 5y agoAn edit button without reseting the likes/retweets counts is dangerous as it can be used to bait and switch or even change the complete history of a user depending on who's looking at it. An edit button that does reset the likes/retweets is equivalent to delete/re-post which already exists. This is dumb.
- hunterb123 5y agoShould be fine if there's a short time limit and/or edit history.
- thedays 5y agoHow 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/number-of-employees 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.
- saagarjha 5y agoWell, 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.
- danso 5y agoThere'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.
- wasssssss1111 5y ago
- wasssssss1111 5y ago
- bsuvc 5y agoAdding an edit button is a “one way door”. Better be sure about it before you roll that out, because there is no going back. Maybe this will be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Twitter should do it. I don’t see people leaving Twitter because of this occasional inconvenience. It seems like there is little upside for Twitter doing this, and there is potential for misuse. People are already used to how tweets work and are mostly satisfied. I prefer knowing that something I already read (and potentially liked) will not be changed later. If the author wants to make a change, it is easy enough to delete and tweet again, or just reply to your own tweet saying “whoops, I left out this word” or whatever.
- devnull3 5y agoI think edit option only for 1-2 min on creation of tweet might not be such a bad option. I have myself found wanting this feature to fix grammer or typo or forgot to add a certain #hashtag, etc
- dbbk 5y agoWhy not just delete it and re-post then?
- devnull3 5y agoSo Deletion & repost will look like: 1. Copy the old tweet content 2. Delete the tweet 3. Start creating new the tweet (but not finalized) 4. Paste the content 5. Edit the content 6. Finalize the tweet (equivalent of Submit button) VS Edit will look like: 1. Press edit 2. Edit the content 3. Finalize (or Submit)
- skybrian 5y agoCould you explain why they couldn't turn it off again? It's not obvious to me.
- djhn 5y agoNot the original commenter but I guess depending on the implementation many edits might have already been made. Are those rolled back as well? What about tweets that reference the edited tweets, which might not make sense now?
- emilfihlman 5y agoFinally. The lack of an edit button is super annoying. But, like FB, there needs to be a visible edit history and we need to know to what version of the post did people respond to.
- mc32 5y agoThank you Elon! I hope this new infusion of ownership and oversight brings fresh ideas to a service that has remained stagnant and is very risk averse.
- unholiness 5y agoTruly astounding that he was able to initiate and approve this change in only negative three days!
- juanani 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jimkleiber 5y agoAs much as I've heard people say they want an edit button, I've rarely heard their reasons for why they want an edit button. What reasons have you heard for why people want an edit option on Twitter?
- hunterb123 5y agoFor corrections? Do you never use an edit button on here?
- jimkleiber 5y agoI guess I meant more in which scenarios. E.g., an edit button to fix the typo I realized I just made after seconds after posting, or the edit button to add additional info that I forgot to add a week later, or the edit button to change my tweet based on what i learned from tweet replies, or the edit button to add info to clarify what I meant, etc. I actually like that Twitter is somewhat immutable so I'm curious which scenarios are driving the pain points for people.
- llbeansandrice 5y agoLots of top-level comments talking about how it's common for newspapers, blogs, basically any _other_ type of web-page to allow edits. Sites like reddit and HN also allow edits in certain contexts/timeperiods. I think these are missing how Twitter is different and how this is a Pandora's box. You can't stop allowing edits, and it will fundamentally change how the platform operates. I think it has a high potential for mis-use and abuse. Currently tweets are, if anything screen-shotted and edited. But if you have a link to the tweet itself, it operates as a source of truth. I can't say I like this change.
- lprd 5y agoIt would be neat if there could be a button to show the original tweet if it was edited - or better yet, show a comparison of what changed much like git.
- sushibowl 5y ago> Sites like reddit and HN also allow edits in certain contexts/timeperiods On Reddit and HN it is also commonly considered etiquette to have append-only comments, writing "EDIT:" in front of the addition to make it clear to readers what is going on. Moreover, reddit indicates in the GUI that a comment has been edited, unless you do it very quickly. Kind of like a git commit, changing a comment that people have already read is considered undesirable. Reddit also stopped allowing edits of post titles, because it was subject to too much abuse. Twitter is going to face similar problems.
- llbeansandrice 5y agoI'm not aware of a time reddit ever allowed editing of post titles and I've been on the platform for...almost a decade (yikes). Was that something they allowed very early on?
- robbyking 5y agoNo, it's comments only.
- 5y ago
- ctoth 5y agoI fundamentally don't understand what the bruhaha is here? If you edit a tweet then obviously Twitter should prevent interaction with previous versions of the tweet. Perhaps each Tweet will get two IDs, the standard Tweet ID from Snowflake and then a version? However the case, it should just prevent commentary (quotes, retweets, and replies) if the tweet being referenced is older than the current version of the tweet with a client-side error. For display it should only display user interactions with the most recent version of the tweet with somewhere to click to see previous versions with their interactions. Nothing is lost, nothing breaks, maybe some clients need some minor updates but even that shouldn't be difficult. Am I missing something?
- ctoth 5y agoApparently I was in fact missing something. But the hivemind does not wish to inform me as to what it was.
- riffic 5y agoI'll believe it when I see it. If you're going to announce something, you better be ironing out the last showstopping bugs in the code and have it ready to be shipping.
- SkyMarshal 5y agoKey quote from Jay Sullivan, VP of Product: > “Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation,” he said. “Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.” If they can add an edit button while achieving that objective, then it should be fine.
- justinhj 5y agoI think the most transparent way to handle edits is to show the latest edit but have links to previous ones. You can still delete a Tweet. I suspect this would work ok with Twitter’s infrastructure that is probably built around immutable tweets, but without any insider knowledge who knows.
- ariyadi 5y agoBisa makin parah
- planetsprite 5y ago>We've been working on an edit button since last year Does it really take over 4 months to make an edit button?
- munificent 5y agoHN: Tech companies should take more time to work through the psychological and social impacts of their tech decisions. Also HN: Why does it take them so long to implement this, it's just a simple technical decision?
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoIt's almost like there are multiple users with differing views on HN
- decebalus1 5y agoI don't think it's about the edit button itself, literally. The fact that a tweet is immutable is likely an assumption running deep inside twitter's system. For a large enough system, I could totally see implementing something like this taking months, just from the cross-team overhead or schema migrations
- econnors 5y ago(this is a guess, I don't work at twitter) December: VP approves initiative January: PM assigned for initial research, weekly iterations on a product spec defining what considerations need to be accounted for February: Engineering lead assigned and starts to scope out technical implications on various datastores, weekly meeting with teams affected to see what's possible/what implications will be March: Engineering team established/actual work starts April: Proof of concept ready, comms start
- dbpatterson 5y agoUmm, if everything was built around the idea that tweets were immutable, yeah I could imagine it's quite a bit of work to change things. Immutable and mutable data can be treated _very_ differently in systems bigger than the little toys you make for fun.
- vmoore 5y agoApart from the obvious Orwellian scenario of airbrushing things we don't like out of history, I think it's a useful feature. Maybe it might be a troll tool, but too many times I made an embarrassing typo that I couldn't cope with (and I have some reach on Twitter). Now I don't know if Twitter will allow you to see the history of edits to tweets, including the original mistake, but I imagine most people won't be paying close attention to the history of tweet amendments, unless you have a large following and are under scrutiny always (think journalists etc). Over the years of using Twitter I would routinely delete all my tweets, and start fresh. Tools like semi-ephemeral[0] are useful, but I am wary of apps that have permissions to read my data, so I eventually scrapped semi-ephemeral and settled for having no Twitter apps installed, because privacy. Fleets were a cool idea and I would actually prefer ephemeral tweets over the ability to edit. I always liked the idea of disappearing messages, because you /will/ regret certain tweets, and I've lost count of how many times I've been genuinely embarrassed because of a tweet I made a year ago (or more!). [0] https://semiphemeral.com/ https://semiphemeral.com/
- gnicholas 5y agoWill it be possible to see if someone liked a tweet before or after an edit? And if I RT a tweet that is later changed, will my RT change as well?
- misiti3780 5y agoThis is also my fear. Imagine a scenario when you like something, and someone edits it and makes the tweet racist etc. There has to be a easy way for users to see the tweet was edited, and see what the edits were.
- gnicholas 5y agoYeah, think about the recent controversy over the "lesser black woman" tweet. [1] The professor deleted the tweet and said it was not worded well. If he could have changed it, he probably would have. Then we'd have a mess of likes and RTs, and it would be pretty important to know whether those people were interacting with the original tweet or an anodyne replacement. 1: https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1486696022516682752/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1486696022516682752/photo/...