Rejoice! Twitter CEO is ‘thinking a lot’ about letting users edit tweets

If you know a dance to please the Twitter gods, then start doing it right now.

Because it seems the greatest wish of Twitter users everywhere could in fact become a reality. Yes, we’re talking about the near-universal desire for Twitter to add an edit button to its service. With our grammatically challenged incoming tweeter-in-chief, one could argue that such a feature has become a matter of national security. (Okay, not really, but…)

During a late-night tweet-brainstorming session, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asked for suggestions about how to improve the service. He publicly discussed the notion of editing tweets and seemed to be focused on the question of how to do it, rather than whether to do it.

This is our most requested feature (today & always). Mostly to quickly fix mistakes. Anything beyond would need to show revision history https://t.co/fHtGNjkuEx

— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016

yup me too. We're thinking a lot about it.

— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016

Cool! So, what’s been holding things back the past 10 years? Well, Dorsey noted that the company would need to figure out just how to implement editing, as well as the rules around it.

For instance: Do you get just a set amount of time in which to make a change? If you can make a change at any time, Dorsey suggested there would need to be a way to view the revision history. It could be tricky, of course, if you embed a tweet (like the ones above) and then someone goes back and changes it. Of course, if you have a change log, then any mistakes still live on in some form, though in a less obvious way.

Dorsey also worried about downsides. These include the fact that tweets are taken as public statements by the media and considered to be the “public record” of what was said. If these can always be altered, that might make them less valuable.

Still, for now, we’ll take “thinking a lot about it” as a sign of hope in a dark age.