Allowing people to edit tweets, from a barebones technical perspective, is trivially easy. Actually Implementing editable tweets on Twitter, with the complex social dynamics and scale, surely is anything but. I’m actually rather surprised they did it at all.
It’s so simple right? CRUD apps (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) are app-building 101! What a gross oversight. But wait. Just as a fun nerdy little exercise, let’s think about what a feature like this might take for the Twitter team.
I listed out a whole bunch of questions that are less straightforward to answer than making an UPDATE request. Now that Tweet editing exists (I don’t have it yet, but I’m seeing all the hype the last few days) let’s see what the answers turned out to be.
Should you be able to edit any tweet you’ve ever tweeted at any time? Or should you just have a few minutes to do it until it locks?
Edit up to 5 times within a 30 minute window.
Do you offer this to everyone? Opt-in? Opt-out?
The feature goes to paid Twitter Blue members. I suppose paying for Twitter Blue is a version of opting either way, but that status is not isolated to editing.
Should you be able to edit tweets or direct messages also?
Just tweets.
What does it look like to edit a tweet? Can it be simple and obvious? Does it need additional UI? How do you expose that UI? Is it worth the extra UI?
I haven’t seen it yet but apparently, it’s an obvious “Edit Tweet” button.
Does the tweet go out to the public timeline immediately or after the editing grace period?
Immediately.
What if someone favorites a tweet and it is later edited? Does it shed the favorites? E.g. a tweet that originally said “I like pancakes!” could be later edited to “People that favorited this like clubbing seals!” (or much worse).
The tweet shows that it is edited. It doesn’t shed its favorites. So you could be seen liking a tweet with a dramatically different meaning than what you intended, but people can see the tweet is edited and see the history.
Same question, with retweets. And with replies.
Not clear to me what happens here yet, but I suspect in any context you see the original, it will be shown it has been edited. I imagine a drastic edit to a parent tweet could make you look like an idiot or worse.
Retweets and replies show the original un-edited text, with UI that shows that it has since been edited. Seems better than the alternative of showing the edited version.
Are there any social or moral implications of this?
Yes haha.
How does tweet editing affect the overall feel of using Twitter? Would a time delay affect that feel? Would people think of tweets differently?
Time will tell here, but so far it seems like it’s not a major change to the feel, as there isn’t really a time delay. Because you can see the history, I’m not sure if trust in Tweets changes that much.
Does tweet editing make hacked accounts an even more dangerous prospect?
The 30 minute window seems like a pretty good protection here.
How do third party clients handle tweet editing? Is there a public API for it? How complex is that?
I doesn’t appear that a third-party client can offer editing, but there is an API for getting edited tweet information, so it can show that tweets are edited. Without doing anything, it appears that edited Tweets are put out as new Tweets, which appears to be the same way Apple has handled editing messages in iMessage and how they show up on older OSs.
https://twitter.com/murtaugh/status/1578420648262631424
Or do you only offer tweet editing through the web? How does that move go over with developers?
It will probably be on the official website and official apps only. I think third-party developers have largely given up on Twitter.
How do you ensure third party editing offers an up-to-par UX? Does that matter?
By not letting them haha.
If tweets aren’t time-delayed, how do you handle edited tweets through the API? – How do you tell third-party clients to update a tweet they are currently displaying rather than show a new one?
Where do edited tweets go? Back on top of the timeline, or stay where they are?
The “Home” (default) view of your time is algorithmic magic, so we probably will never know if an edited tweet somehow boosts it, but I sorta doubt it. In the “Show latest tweets” view, that is in time-order, and it’s not entirely clear if it’s the edited time/date or the original time/date that affects that order.
Should it be visually displayed that a tweet has been edited? How do you enforce that in third-party apps?
It is visually distinct. It isn’t enforced in third-party apps.
Are there legal implications here? What if someone tweets something illegal and then changes it to something legal?
I have no idea. Because the illegal thing is in the history, I imagine they are still culpable, but I just don’t know enough about the law here.
Does tweet editing open up any kind of bad guy behavior? What kind of mis-use can be expected?
I’m 100% sure they will try and it remains to be seen. The obvious mis-use is changing the meaning of a tweet or using it to attempt to hide spam or abusive content.
What are the infrastructural concerns? Are all revisions saved? How much additional web server and database load is this?
We’ll never know all the gritty details, but I imagine the load is fairly trivial. All revisions are saved. They were willing to do it, so the calculatinos have been made.
Do you throttle editing like you presumably do for tweet creation?
You only get 5 edits so they probably aren’t time-throttled.
How actually requested is this feature? Is it just a vocal minority?
Based on the rollout so far, it seems like this is pretty huge. They said: “this is our most requested feature to date”.
What’s in it for Twitter if they go down this path? Happier users? Is that a guarantee?
Hopefully, for them, a bunch of Twitter Blue paid subscribers. I wonder if you can be a free user, tweet something you wish you could change, upgrade, and edit the tweet before the 30 minute window. Seems like an upgrade moment they probably thought a lot about, so hopefully.
How much time, effort, and money is this going to take? (Design, development, UX, testing, etc) Are they prepared to support this for the life of the product?
We’ll never know, but I bet it was a ton and will be forever technical debt.
Is the team into the idea or would it be grueling and not-fun?
We’ll never know, but I’d guess it was fun to work on something you absolutely know users want.
It’s super early days here, but all in all, I’d say they made some pretty good choices here.
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