{"id":13855,"date":"2022-09-04T14:38:56","date_gmt":"2022-09-04T14:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/09\/04\/twitters-edit-button-is-a-big-test-for-the-platforms-future\/"},"modified":"2022-09-04T14:38:57","modified_gmt":"2022-09-04T14:38:57","slug":"twitters-edit-button-is-a-big-test-for-the-platforms-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/09\/04\/twitters-edit-button-is-a-big-test-for-the-platforms-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter\u2019s edit button is a big test for the platform\u2019s future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/9\/3\/23335692\/twitter-edit-button-platform-bluesky<\/a>
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Twitter seems to have handled adding an edit button<\/a> about as well as possible. The edit button biases toward transparency, adding an edit history for every tweet and a big notice saying a tweet has been edited. Users will only have 30 minutes to edit their tweet, and will only be able to do so \u201ca few times.\u201d Twitter\u2019s surely going to be looking closely at those numbers in its testing to see exactly how editable tweets should really be. It\u2019s only coming to paying subscribers of Twitter Blue, and the test is going to start out small. Twitter is being as careful as can be on this one, and seems to have landed in the right place.<\/p>\n

Whether Twitter should <\/em>have an edit button is still a fun and controversial debate. Will some users abuse the feature, creating (or manufacturing) viral tweets and then changing them to something problematic that lots of users see? You betcha. Do most people want an edit button to do totally valid, normal, platform-improving things? Yep. Can Twitter do enough to track and mitigate the abuse, so that the vast majority of users \u2014 who just want to correct typos, re-phrase things that are being misinterpreted, and update their tweets as things change \u2014 can use it for its intended purpose? That\u2019s the real question.<\/p>\n

The Twitter edit button was a big topic of conversation on <\/small>the most recent Vergecast<\/small><\/a>, which you can listen to above or wherever you get podcasts.<\/small><\/p>\n

Over the last couple of years, Twitter has picked up the pace of its product development in a big way. The company made, and fulfilled, a promise to be more open about what it was thinking about and testing. Fleets were going to be huge<\/a>, until they weren\u2019t<\/a>. Spaces are the future of Twitter, which apparently now includes podcasts<\/a>. Twitter seemed all-in on newsletters<\/a> for about an hour and a half. Super Follows<\/a>! Twitter Shops<\/a>! Now there\u2019s Circle<\/a>, Twitter\u2019s feature for sharing with only your closest friends and followers. It\u2019s a lot of stuff, and it\u2019s hard to tell how much Twitter actually cares about any of it. <\/p>\n

This is in many ways a good thing: Twitter moved too slowly for more than a decade, and finally started shipping software at impressive speed. But the thing about Twitter is it\u2019s not like other social networks. It\u2019s more distributed. Many people encounter tweets as embeds on websites; many use third-party Twitter accounts; many see tweets just as screenshots on cable news. You can embed Facebook posts and TikToks, sure, but Twitter\u2019s status as the sort of informational nerve center of the internet makes the stakes higher for how tweets move through the world.<\/p>\n

Part of Twitter\u2019s recent product push has been to make its own app better so that more people use it, look at ads inside it, and drop $5 a month on Twitter Blue. Cramming more ancillary features into its app is a classic platform strategy. But Twitter\u2019s cultural impact still vastly exceeds the actual popularity of the app. With a presidential election coming up in the US, too, Twitter\u2019s reach is likely to spike again over the next couple of years. That means that for Twitter to actually make a feature stick, it has to make it stick outside the confines of its own app. <\/p>\n

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