Twitter seems to have handled the addition of an edit button as well as possible. The edit button strives for transparency, adding edit history for each tweet and a large notification that the tweet has been edited. Users will only have 30 minutes to edit their tweet and will only be able to do so “a few times”. Twitter will certainly be looking closely at these numbers in their tests to see how precisely editable tweets should be. This is only for Twitter Blue paying subscribers and the test will start small. Twitter is being as careful as possible about this, and it seems they’ve hit the right spot.
Whether Twitter should have an edit button is still a fun and controversial debate. Will some users abuse the feature by creating (or producing) viral tweets and then changing them to something problematic that many users see? You can bet. Do most people want an edit button to do perfectly valid, normal, platform-enhancing things? yes Can Twitter do enough to track and mitigate abuse so that the majority of users – who just want to fix typos, rephrase things that are misinterpreted, and update their tweets when things get change – to be able to use it for its intended purpose? That is the real question.
Twitter’s edit button was a big topic of conversation in the latest Vergecast, which you can listen to above or wherever you get podcasts.
Over the past few years, Twitter has greatly accelerated the pace of its product development. The company made and followed through on a promise to be more open about what it’s thinking about and testing. Fleets would be huge until they were. Spaces are the future of Twitter, which apparently now includes podcasts. Twitter seemed to be all over the bulletins for about an hour and a half. Super follow! Shop on Twitter! Now there’s Circle, Twitter’s feature for sharing with only your closest friends and followers. That’s a lot of stuff, and it’s hard to tell how much Twitter cares about it.
In many ways, this is a good thing: Twitter moved too slowly for more than a decade, and finally started shipping software at an impressive rate. But the thing about Twitter is that it’s not like other social networks. It’s more common. Many people encounter tweets as embedded in websites; many use third-party Twitter accounts; many see the tweets simply as screenshots on cable news. You can embed Facebook posts and TikToks, sure, but Twitter’s status as something of an informational nerve center of the internet makes the stakes higher for how tweets move around the world.
Part of Twitter’s recent product push has been to make its own app better so that more people use it, see ads on it, and drop $5 a month into Twitter Blue. Cramming more ancillary features into an app is a classic platform strategy. But Twitter’s cultural impact still far exceeds the app’s actual popularity. With the upcoming presidential election in the US as well, Twitter’s reach is likely to grow again in the next few years. This means that in order for Twitter to actually create a feature, it has to make it stay outside of the boundaries of its own app.
In order for Twitter to actually create a feature, it needs to make it stay outside the confines of its own app
Twitter’s track record on this front is, in a word, terrible. The company has made noise about being a better partner to third-party developers, but many developers are so jaded by Twitter’s behavior over the years that they’re unlikely to immediately buy into Twitter’s new ideas. And most of the things the company builds and delivers aren’t even available on Tweetdeck, the power-user app that Twitter owns.
It’s one thing for apps and platforms to not support certain features or plugins, but the edit button represents a fundamental change to Twitter’s core unit: the tweet. If a tweet can represent different things in different places, depending on where you see it, Twitter suddenly starts to feel like an unreliable narrator.
Developers, we’ve got you… We know how important it will be for you to have visibility into edited tweets, and we’re ready to offer read support for edited tweet metadata via the Twitter API.
Expect more details soon. https://t.co/smJnp8uYqq
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) September 1, 2022
And if Twitter’s future is more as a protocol than a platform, that will become even more important. (The usual Elon Musk caveats apply here, of course—no one knows the future of Twitter, it’s all chaos, and who knows where it’s all coming from.) Twitter has said for several years that it wants developers to “drive the future of innovation on Twitter’ and rethink everything from how the community works to how the algorithms work. Project Bluesky was created at Twitter to build an “open and decentralized social media standard” and is already working on tools that would make it easier to move posts or engagement between platforms.
Twitter is trying to engage developers with the edit button, which is encouraging. “We know how important it will be for you to have visibility into edited Tweets,” tweeted the Twitter Dev account on Thursday, “and we’re ready to offer read support for edited Tweet metadata via the Twitter API.” That’s good news, as for developers and researchers alike who will definitely be curious how to use the edit button. But Twitter also continues to claim that it’s just a test, and chasing every test on Twitter is a dangerous use of any developer’s time.
It seems likely that Twitter will follow suit and eventually roll out the edit button widely. As the company likes to remind us, this has been the most requested feature among Twitter users for years, and certainly most of the requesters don’t want the feature for chaos-inducing or Bitcoin-fraud reasons. If and when it comes, it will change Twitter because it changes the tweet. And it will change things far beyond the Twitter app, whether the company is ready or not.
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