Can we please petition Twitter to enable editing of tweets?

[MineralMan]

I'd like that. I don't use it for politics, actually, but I hate it the worst when I miss a typo or a punctuation mark and have to delete the tweet to fix it. That's especially true if it has already been retweeted, replied to, or liked by people.

I try to proofread carefully, but once in a while, I miss something.

[tblue37]

1. I wish they allowed editing. I don't much use Twitter, except to read, but occasionally I will reply

to someone's tweet, and I am paranoid about possible typos.

[MineralMan]

2. Since most people tweet from cell phones or other mobile devices,

the chance of a typo goes way up, compared with typing on a standard keyboard. And then there's Autocorrect, which can be humorous, but often inserts something inappropriate. I do read my tweets carefully before sending them, but about one in 20 tweets, there's a dumbass error I should have caught.

A reminder to myself to read each one a few more times before sending.

[tblue37]

4. Also, even after I correct a ridiculous autocorrect, sometimes it changes back to the

nonsense a split second before I hit "post." Usually I then spot the mess and go back to fix it, but sometimes I am in a hurry and don't see the nonsense until I return to respond to someone's reply to my post. As a (recently retired) college English teacher, such things are terribly embarrassing to me.

Remember when DU had a time limit on edits? I missed the cutoff a couple of times, and was devastated when I returned to a post with a typo.

WaPo has a 5-minute edit limit, but so far I haven't missed their cutoff.

I do proof carefully, but autocorrect is a monster. I've tried to turn it off on my tablet, but it simply ignores my attempts. I think it's in cahoots with Skynet.

[jberryhill]

3. "if it has already been retweeted, replied to, or liked by people"

In other words, you want Twitter to provide people with the ability to change what they have said, after people have replied to it?

As a joke, I did that here once - you elicit some reactions from someone in the course of a conversation, then go back and edit your post in order to complete change the context and meaning of the conversation. It's an old and tired trick on message forums which permit editing.

So, if I post a tweet saying "Re-Tweet and Like if you love Jesus" and a bunch of Jesus-loving people retweet and like it, then I can wait a sufficient period of time, change "Jesus" to "Satan", and then the twitter timelines of all of those people will reflect their love for Satan.

Just because you would want a feature for innocuous purposes does not mean that the feature doesn't somehow open up new forms of abuse.

That kind of thing drives me crazy. I work in a policy environment where people are constantly coming up with ideas that are designed by well-meaning people, for well-meaning people, and they are consistently oblivious to unintended consequences of those ideas.

[tblue37]

6. But often we catch a typo but after hitting "post," and would like is to fix it immediately. WaPo

Last edited Mon Jan 13, 2020, 08:15 PM - Edit history (1)

allows a 5-minute edit window. That doesn't seem unreasonable for Twitter.

[jberryhill]

14. I'm aware of the problem

I too, have typos in Tweets.

Either you delete the Tweet or you live with it.

But they can't have a crew assigned to figuring out if edits to Tweets are, or are not, made in good faith, or if they are made to change the meaning.

As far as it being unreasonable, that underestimates the staggering issues of operating a system which deals with 500 million messages per day.

[MineralMan]

8. As here, viewers should be able to see previous versions at any time.

That would eliminate that issue.

[jberryhill]

13. So, to be clear...

I'm not familiar with the architecture of Twitter's system, which manages a truly staggering number of communications from millions of users around the planet, but you are persuaded that providing the ability to see "previous versions" of a single tweet could just ride right on top of the current system architecture without significant expense, and will result in enough additional revenue to cover the development cost, yes?

[MineralMan]

15. No idea. Doesn't matter.

Twitter's not going to do it because it would please me, anyhow.

[TeamPooka]

5. Nope, Twitter is a publication of record.

[NewJeffCT]

7. People used to make this request of Twitter fairly regularly

I wouldn't know if they still do since my account was suspended.

[htuttle]

9. Given their architecture, it would be pretty hard to implement

Once you post a tweet, the data gets replicated all over the planet to different edge servers in different parts of the world. When you delete a tweet, it just broadcasts that delete message to the edge servers, and they take care of it.

Since the system can treat tweets as read-only, it never needs to worry about whether the data in them is up to date, which saves an enormous amount of 'work' that the system might otherwise need to do.

It would be a nice feature, but hugely expensive from a computing point of view.

[MineralMan]

10. OK, thanks. I guess I'll just ramp up my proofreading fu.

[NewJeffCT]

12. If the typo is that bad

just delete it and tweet again with correct spelling

[dewsgirl]

11. I do use it for politics, and hate that there is no edit function.