Twitter May Be Getting a Way Overdue Feature
All things considered, we can be a pretty voyeuristic society, and Twitter is one of our favorite pastimes — especially this year. We got our fill of celebs duking it out with followers, celeb reactions to the Cubs beating their curse and hilarious Obama and Biden memes. There was a lot of not-so-great stuff though, what with self-contradicting tweets (we aren’t pointing fingers) and fake news circulating the platform. Yet hundreds of millions of people still flock to Twitter every month. 317 million, to be exact.
Following in the footsteps of Brian Chesky: what's the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017? #Twitter2017
— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016
Replies ranged from things like following topics, not people to tagging tweets (like hashtags, but with broader scope). Editing took the cake though, and Dorsey stated that the team at Twitter was really thinking about it. He also asked which version of editing people would prefer:
@cloleaf is it more important to edit for spelling/corrections? 5 minute window to edit mistakes or do you need to be able to edit anytime?
— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016
Editing for up to a few minutes after the initial posting would allow for fixing typos and the like, while editing any time could cause problems. By changing tweets even slightly, news sites or people with a lot of influence could change their tweets’ context and meaning. While it’s obvious when people delete tweets, people might not notice if a tweet has been slightly altered. That means it could seem as though someone has endorsed an edited tweet when really they endorsed the original tweet. Like this example:
@JBoorman I say "do you like to eat pizza", you reply "yes" 3 minutes later. I change pizza to babies. Wouldn't you rather I deleted it?
— Justyn Howard (@Justyn) December 29, 2016
Yikes! This could definitely cause a lot of problems. On the other hand though, Twitter could implement anytime editing with revision history, like Facebook does. That way people could see what, if anything, has been changed. Perhaps Twitter could also have the revisions display who liked which version of a tweet, so as to eliminate any confusion whatsoever.
To be totally honest, we don’t see why you can’t just copy a tweet, delete it and paste and rephrase it. It’s only 140 characters, right?
Do you think Twitter should add an edit feature? Tell us your thoughts @BritandCo!
(h/t Engadget, photo via Getty)