Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey has made it clear that the social media platform will never have an edit button.
Speaking during a Question and Asnwer session with Wired, Dorsey was asked if there’ll be an edit button for Twitter in 2020. He replies, with a faint smile: “The answer is no.”
According to The Verge, this isn’t a huge surprise. Although Twitter’s users have long argued for the benefits of an edit button, the company has always been ambivalent; happy to consider the question to placate its users, but never actually committing to a fix. As Twitter’s product lead Kayvon Beykpour said last summer: “Honestly, it’s a feature that I think we should build at some point, but it’s not anywhere near the top of our priorities.”
In the video Q&A, Dorsey expands on this thinking, noting that the decision to leave out an edit button has its roots in 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 says. “We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling, in the early days.”
He notes that the service has moved on since, but the company doesn’t consider an edit button worth it. There are good reasons for editing tweets, he says, like fixing typos and broken links, but also malicious applications, like editing content to mislead people.
“So, these are all the considerations,” says Dorsey. “But we’ll probably never do it.”
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