Newspapers 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.
The biggest difference has to do with how Twitter has been used. Your retweets and likes show up on your profile and thus edits made to tweets may change what appears when someone looks at your profile. Unless they do it in some smarter way than most[0], this could personally devastating to folks because likes and retweets are viewed as endorsements (despite what some think).
The second biggest difference is newspapers tend not to change the entire point of the article in their edits, and aren't out to troll their engaged audience.
0: ie show the edited content on the page alongside the previous version(s) with the same prominence and, most importantly, without having to click anything to show an old version.
You're talking about transparency, which is important, but it's not user experience. We know how to make edit buttons that have transparency, just have an 'Edited' link and make the edit log accessible. Easy. This is not an engineering problem.
The problem with the edit button is the abuse vector, what the low friction path is, the effect of the feature on the community, the whole user experience.
It wouldn't even be right to compare Facebook's edit feature to anything Twitter does, because the communities and the mediums are wildly different.
As an example of unintended consequences, viral tweets are often embedded on articles. Editing them via an account takeover or rogue Twitter apps (if not handled correctly) would lead to a lot of crypto ads reaching Buzzfeed.
I 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.
I think Reddit gets this right and Facebook Groups gets this wrong:
Facebook Groups: member-visible changelog
Reddit: you can edit the comment within 3 minutes with no "edited" sticker, but after 3 minutes if you edit then the comment's timestamp gets an asterisk next to it.
> Newspapers change titles and content of existing posts all the time.
In fact, launching with a headline that matches the URL, and waiting until the page gets scraped/indexed, in order to then start a series of A/B tests for narrative, ranking, clickability, etc is the de-facto process for news orgs.
They will also stand to benefit from this change more than your average shit-poster.
It's really amusing when the URL is something like cats_are_better_than_dogs_science_shows and the article has been updated to be titled "Study shows dogs, cats basically the same".
>Newspapers change titles and content of existing posts all the time.
Sure, but I trust a newspaper to not swap their article out for something repulsive to troll people. I don't have that same trust in a random Twitter user.
It's entirely different though, you can't compare short form to long form journalism. Twitter is a real time item platform, things happen in an instant. Most people don't even know that NYTs changes stories and it's actually a big deal that they do and that they are generally not transparent about it, which is why such third parties do track it. An edit button on Twitter is a horrible idea. If they do it, they better put a time limit on it, that's 30 seconds to a minute.
I think the problem with Twitter is that it's built around retweets and response tweets. But if the thing you are responding to upstream can change it creates an issue where something can change after it's been broadcast and retweeted all over the place.
I 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.
Unlike 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.
Do 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.
> I hope it is going to be similar to editable comments on Github, with a dropdown to see older versions.
It took a while for them to add this. And amusingly, comments (including those opening issues and PRs) are a bit more like a wiki than personal comments—if you have the appropriate permissions, you can edit comments by others. For a long time you could do so with no visible record that it was done. Which is objectively terrible but was hilarious if you worked on a team with a good sense of humor and reasonable restraint.
Note that this isn't really an "undo", just a 5-60 second time delay before posting during which the user can change their mind before it's actually published.
Since this is a verge article, can I also say I like their comment system? You get a minute or so to fix any typos after submitting after which it is locked in.
There 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.
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.
I 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
Not 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?
Lots 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.
> 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.
I'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?
It 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.
> “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.
I 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).
I 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.
Judging 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.
As 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.
Alternatively, 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.
Readit News
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
[1] https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1510985771343351818
[2] https://polititweet.org/
The second biggest difference is newspapers tend not to change the entire point of the article in their edits, and aren't out to troll their engaged audience.
0: ie show the edited content on the page alongside the previous version(s) with the same prominence and, most importantly, without having to click anything to show an old version.
ETA: typos.
Good. Maybe people should spend a moment figuring out whether the person they're retweeting is an asshole before giving power to their voice.
You're talking about transparency, which is important, but it's not user experience. We know how to make edit buttons that have transparency, just have an 'Edited' link and make the edit log accessible. Easy. This is not an engineering problem.
The problem with the edit button is the abuse vector, what the low friction path is, the effect of the feature on the community, the whole user experience.
It wouldn't even be right to compare Facebook's edit feature to anything Twitter does, because the communities and the mediums are wildly different.
For example, display added text in italics and deleted text in strikethrough. (Like some legislatures do: https://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislative-staff/res...)
And show this view by default, so that users must read through the old text when looking at the new text.
Things get more complicated with multiple edits to a single tweet. You could possibly extend the approach, or you could allow only one edit.
Screenshots of tweets seems like the worst way to "archive" them, since the screenshot can be trivially faked.
https://shashiirk.github.io/fake-tweet-generator/
Facebook Groups: member-visible changelog
Reddit: you can edit the comment within 3 minutes with no "edited" sticker, but after 3 minutes if you edit then the comment's timestamp gets an asterisk next to it.
Deleted Comment
In fact, launching with a headline that matches the URL, and waiting until the page gets scraped/indexed, in order to then start a series of A/B tests for narrative, ranking, clickability, etc is the de-facto process for news orgs.
They will also stand to benefit from this change more than your average shit-poster.
Sure, but I trust a newspaper to not swap their article out for something repulsive to troll people. I don't have that same trust in a random Twitter user.
https://www.boredpanda.com/people-edit-original-questions-an...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/fo6pki/ask_me_a_q...
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.
Links and uploaded media should not be editable.
It took a while for them to add this. And amusingly, comments (including those opening issues and PRs) are a bit more like a wiki than personal comments—if you have the appropriate permissions, you can edit comments by others. For a long time you could do so with no visible record that it was done. Which is objectively terrible but was hilarious if you worked on a team with a good sense of humor and reasonable restraint.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue-featu...
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.
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.
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.
Until it gets deleted, at which point only screenshots and archive sites *may* be available (or it's totally lost if no one thought to save it)
> “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.
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).
I don’t think such a change really matters at a company like Twitter. The problem is more about principle than technicalities.
Dead Comment
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.
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.