Jack Dorsey on Probability of Edit Button: ‘We’ll Probably Never Do It’
Written by SOURCE on January 15, 2020
While Twitter is rolling out some new features, including one that gives users greater control over replies, it looks like we may never be given the option to edit tweets.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been trying to figure out how editing tweets could possibly work, but in a new Q&A video with Wired, he revealed the most definitive answer to the question that we’ve heard. When asked if there will be an edit button for Twitter in 2020, he replied around the 3:00 minute mark, “The answer is no.”
Dorsey explained his answer, stating that the decision to not include the edit button stems from Twitter’s original design. “We started as an SMS, text message service. And as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back,” he said. “We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling, in the early days.”
He noted that while the service has moved beyond SMS and is now an app, the company still doesn’t think an edit button is worth it. Though he sees the benefit to it—such as fixing typos and broken links—there can also be hateful intent, like editing content that can then become misleading.
“So, these are all the considerations,” Dorsey said. “But we’ll probably never do it.”
Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it will soon introduce a feature that limits who can reply to tweets, providing four different reply classifications: Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.
