Should Twitter have an edit button?
Discussing why Twitter should allow users to edit and not edit their tweets, which some very interesting and insightful points.
Welcome back! For today's 'Understanding Nuances', we present a very relevant and interesting topic to discuss. Should twitter launch a tweet edit button?
A classical product feature launch case!
When a reporter asked Jack Dorsey if Twitter has any plans for introducing an edit button, his answer was - "Probably Never". One may simply ask, why? In fact, why even create so much fuss for such a hygiene feature?
Let's answer that question in not more than two pictures shown below.
Imagine a world where you can edit a tweet -
This is my original tweet in that world, and let's just say someone commented on my tweet (for this example, I have myself commented on my tweet).
Let's say I edit my tweet later on.
Now the problem starts to show up.
Tweet edit functionality is a problem statement for fraud control and social media abuse. Abusers could attack or threaten people and then change what they said, and if we report it, it wouldn't be the original tweet. An angry politician can hurt millions before editing his tweet, racism, discriminatory tweets; in fact, anything said could be taken back, leaving many users abused or scammed with no or little proof of the allegation.
Why do I say little? Because the edit feature can still keep a log of historical edits, right? Like the one we have on Facebook.Â
But would this be sufficient to control feature abuse? Experts say no.
Facebook still faces the feature abuse problem for the edit button. Not everyone is able to observe if the post is edited or not. For a platform like Twitter, where content is crisp and scrolling speed is high, the attention span of users reduces even further, making the edit log thing less noticeable.Â
Although there are 100s of reasons as to why Twitter should not launch an edit button, Twitter's previous CEO Jack Dorsey, when asked the reason why he thinks edit will never make it to Twitter, chose to answer with an oversimplified and less complicated statement - "when you send a text, you can't really take it back", "we wanted to preserve that vibe."
Folks who were looking for a more detailed and serious answer from the CEO must be disappointed, pretty much my reaction as well -Â
But looking at another side of the coin, there is a long list of recommendations that can help reduce the risk when introducing edit functionality on Twitter (if they plan to release it in future).
Let's go through some of them-Â Â
Keep the edit option only for the initial few mins after the tweet has gone live.
Keep a log of edited tweets and give users the option to see actual tweets.
Allowing users to change not more than 80% of tweet structure while editing - can be done in a time-bound manner for better risk control.
Resetting retweets and likes to 0 when a tweet is edited.
There is a small but important caveat hidden in all these discussions. What purpose does the retweet functionality serve on Twitter?
Retweets allow users to share instances of opinion mainly expressed by popular personalities and pages across their network, something that retains value only when expressed without a reverse button. Think about it this way, what happens when a controversial tweet that was retweeted thousands of times gets edited. Thousands of retweets and quote retweets and their subsequent retweets lose relevance on the platform and essentially become garbage. Overall, user experience goes drastically down.
Don't believe me, see it yourself -
You can check these tweets and threads for more such insights and debates
Editing a viral tweet is gaslighting thousands of users about their choice of retweets and likes. This brings down the discussion to a famous statement said by George Orwell - "Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past". Essentially if users can edit their past tweets, they can in a way manipulate future outcomes.
Twitter is a vast archive of our timestamped thoughts, woven in a digital ocean of interlinking threads. If people can edit tweets, it's not an archive anymore. This is not a matter of user experience but one of historical importance.
On this note, we will end today’s Understanding Nuances article. Also, we have been posting daily product observations and key insights on Twitter and would love for you to follow us there and share your thoughts and opinions as well. If you haven’t already subscribed to the newsletter, do so to receive our latest article straight in your mailbox.
We’ll be seeing you next week with another teardown. Until then, if you enjoyed today’s article and found it insightful, do share ‘Understanding Nuances’ among your friends and peers!