Twitter's Jack Dorsey Finally Explains Why There's No Edit Button
For as long as there has been Twitter, people have clamored for an edit button. Apparently, it's very easy to be misconstrued or include a typo in the world's most famous micro-blogging platform. But after more than a decade of criticism, Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey is putting his food down: There will be no edit button, at least in the foreseeable future.
In a video for Wired, Dorsey took questions from his website, which inevitably brought the edit button to his attention. However, because the company wants to "preserve that vibe and that feeling" of sending an SMS text message, which is how the company began as a text message company, they aren't adding it.
"The answer is no," said Jack Dorsey to whether the edit button would be made available in 2020. "The reason there's no edit button and there hasn't been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS text messaging service. So as you all know, when you send a text, you can't really take it back."
Dorsey goes a little further in-depth in the problems associated with editing tweets. The primary concern is that if a tweet that had been retweeted and broadcasted to a wider audience, what would happen if the original tweet were edited and the content was changed.
However, there's still hope for those who just want a chance to fix a typo or two.
"We've considered a 1-minute window or a 30-second window to correct something," he said. "But that also means that we have to delay sending that tweet out because once it's out, people see it. So these are all the considerations. It's just work but we'll probably never do it."
That wasn't the only question posed to Dorsey. One brave soul asked him how to get verified. He replied:
There’s a guy named Kayvon, and he handles all the verification, which is the blue checkmark. So if you either DM him, or mention him, you have a high probability of getting a blue checkmark. So it’s @K-A-Y-V-Z. Verification, he’s the verification god. So just go to him and he’ll get you sorted.
The joke went over just as Dorsey intended, with people flooding his employee's Twitter account with verification requests. He must be a great guy to work for.
@kayvz sooooooo verification god…. can i get verified
— kaleb (@digitalkaleb) January 14, 2020
@kayvz Would be really cool if u could lay ur hands on me so I can be verified.
— Dr_Rager (@blanosBthanos) January 15, 2020
@kayvz mr. Dorsey said you’re the man to talk to.
— THE REAL Mike V (@mikeyvern246) January 15, 2020
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El Lugubre
"Tradition"
Boo
"Someone might post a viral lolcat and then replace it with nazi propaganda at the top of its popularity"
Just add 3 things.
A maximum number of characters to be edited. Maybe both. Messages that go "Sexism is not okay" only for then delete the "not" won't be as widespread once people get used to the feature. It is them just justifying laziness because of a few cases that will decrease over time.
A time limit, say 24 hours, to edit your post and only within the guidelines provided. This is for fixing typos, that's all
Finally, a "This tweet has been edited" or a symbol that means the same to stamp posts that have been edited.
Another suggestion is to add the possibility to report a message for changing the message into something not allowed by community guidelines. If enough people report and the post indeed has been edited, then it is worth a look from the community managers
Or, you know, do nothing.
Philipp
MP-Lily
y'know, unlike Twitter, we don't have comments "go viral" and get massive and require context changes… Seriously this is about as irritating as the way Deviantart handles deleting comments(They CAN'T be deleted, just "hidden", which means you can still see them as a "comment was hidden" message, and considering how prone that site is to spammy comments…)