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The case for editing tweets

The case for editing tweets

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April 13th, 2017

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Humans are fallible creatures, and every day we make mistakes large and small. Religion accounts for this problem with the concept of salvation — deliverance from sin through the divine grace of God. Twitter, on the other hand, makes you leave your stupid mistakes up for everyone to see. God forgives; Twitter doesn't. Why can't we edit tweets? 

It's a question I ask on Twitter a few times a week. Usually I direct this question at the official @Twitter account, which the company uses to goose engagement with a series of friendly, apolitical writing prompts. "Trick or treat?” it asked on Halloween. My answer: edit tweets. "#WorldSeries game 7. Who you got?" it wanted to know in October. For me the choice was clear: gotta go with editing tweets.

Most of the time when I tweet "edit tweets" at Twitter, which is... a lot, I am showered with likes and retweets from supportive fellow users. But from time to time I encounter a doubter — someone who believes that to publish a tweet is to hammer it into stone. Allow someone to fix a typo, they tell me, and the social order will collapse. These people are defeatists, and we ought to reject their collective failure of imagination.

To oppose the editing of tweets is to embrace nihilism

On one hand, it is true that Twitter's efforts to improve its service have often made it more confusing. Implementing an elegant, intuitive editing feature will not be without its challenges. At the same time, to suggest that such an implementation would be impossible is absurd on its face. Good software accommodates its users’ frailties; it does not beg them for accommodation. And so today let us speak on behalf of progress: let us make the case for editing tweets.

At this point the tweets-are-sacred crowd interrupts us to say: just delete it and tweet it again. And perhaps, if you catch your mistake in the first two or three seconds, this is a fine approach. (Indeed, in the absence of editable tweets, it is the only approach.) But most of us are alerted to our mistakes only later — after they have collected their share of likes and retweets, after an exchange or two with followers. At that point, deleting-and-repeating severs conversation threads, breaks quoted tweets, and turns replies into orphans. The tweets-are-sacred crowd warns us of creating chaos, and yet chaos is already the system they have consigned us to. 

Sometimes in a 140-character message, tapped out with our fat little fingers, we misspell a word. Or use the wrong word. Or omit a word. Maybe we phrase something inelegantly, so people think we are terrible, when in reality we were simply in a rush. In these moments, we seek the ability to correct our mistake without having to start from scratch.

I propose an option in a tweet's inverted-caret drop-down menu that reads thus: "edit tweet." Tap it and you can correct any mistake and republish. The new version is served across Twitter wherever the tweet exists, including retweets and quote-tweets. Next to the tweet's timestamp, a prominent new word appears: "edited." Tap the word and Twitter displays the previous versions of the tweet underneath the latest one.

Update tweets to let readers know they have been edited

The tweets-are-sacred crowd's biggest fear, so far as I can tell, is that someone will use the editing feature maliciously to make those who liked or retweeted the original tweet look terrible. For example, a picture of an adorable puppy might be edited, after it has been retweeted thousands of times, to display a picture of something deeply offensive, such as the president of the United States.

I propose that likes and retweets simply live with each individual version of tweet. For simplicity’s sake, the timeline could show the aggregate number of engagements. But were you to click in, you would see that 99 percent of the likes and tweets belonged to the puppy, and 1 percent belonged to the picture of the president. In this way, Twitter could discourage a small minority from trolling their followers, while granting the large majority a service afforded to the users of nearly every other internet text box.

And what of embedded tweets? Would hooligans who find their tweets suddenly featured in a blog post not race en masse to replace their newsworthy tweets with Goatse? Perhaps they would, consequences to their personal brands be damned. And so perhaps Twitter could default to displaying the version of the tweet that was originally embedded. Tap a “refresh” icon on the old version to see the latest.

Those who oppose editing complain ideas like these would add to Twitter a hint of — complexity. They point to any edge case to suggest a single corrected typo would break Twitter forever. But let us be clear: you can edit your posts on Facebook. You can edit your posts on Tumblr. You can edit your posts on Medium and on Instagram and on Slack. Some of these services, including the largest ones, have resharing features that require the cached text to be updated for those who shared it after the original is edited.

How difficult was this to do? Let's ask Facebook’s vice president of engineering, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, responding yesterday to the analyst Benedict Evans, who is in the anti-editing camp:

Was the rollout of editing on Facebook posts accompanied by wide-scale trolling, or rioting in the streets? No. Do you even remember it being introduced at all? No. And yet do you not find it occasionally useful, when you type "ducking" in a case where you obviously meant to use an F

None of this will be enough to reassure the tweets-are-sacred crowd, because nothing could. For them, the threat that a tweet might be edited to obscure its original sentiment is simply too terrifying to confront. One gets the sense that these people would outlaw deleting tweets, if they could. Decades ago they would have warned you against having an answering machine at your home, lest a burglar learn you were away and come steal all your possessions. The fact that such mischief is possible in theory ignores the fact that, in practice, it almost never happens.

Twitter faces bigger problems than this one, of course. But its failure to build a core feature of every other internet text box is so glaring that it demands, nearly 11 years into the company’s history, a response. Good software accommodates its users, rather than ask them to accommodate it. We should be able to edit tweets because we are, in the end, only human. We should be able to edit tweets because the arguments against editing tweets, individually and collectively, are trash.