> Dorsey was unusually direct: “The answer is no,” he says.
> “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," explains Dorsey. "So as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”
Bingo, that's exactly what Twitter Engineers have stated in the past. Example:
https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...
a) You're constraining the time-to-edit b) You're constrained to a single edit
But it could be a lot of work to ensure that it's a consistent experience since you'd have to untangle the "cache this thing for-literally-ever" expectations that may exist.
This isn't as simple as counting the number of changed characters, especially when you have to consider at least dozens, better hundreds, of languages.
But then again you can already cram about ten times as much meaning into a single tweet if you write in Chinese or Japanese, so maybe they just don't care.
I feel like GitHub already solved that problem by showing an edit history on comments. Twitter could do the same thing.
Even easier: don't actually publish tweets for 60 seconds, during which time they can be edited.
The speed Twitter moves I think a lot more people are going to mash the retweet button than the “see edits” button.
(You could also extend this to allowing the annotation to be added to a run of text and shove it in the entities object for extra clarity / highlighting.)
Imagine - a $4/m edit button. What a joke.
Given Twitters toxicity it should probably be done with a huge mark "this tweet has changed" and an option to see previous versions just be not be abused.
