Over the course of the past few months, Twitter has been at the center of attention for a variety of reasons. At first it was due to Elon Musk’s interest in the acquisition of the American social network; share price surged as people associated a new ownership to the implementation of long-awaited features yet with limited information on negotiations the initial excitement quickly dissipated. What got people talking about twitter again is their recent decision to implement the long-awaited “edit” functionality.
For many years an edit button has been a basic tool blogs and social media platforms offered their users, yet Twitter had held back on its implementation for unknown reasons. Some imagined it had to do with accountability, as not being able to modify a post after its publication would make users choose their words carefully so as to not leave their tweets up to interpretation. The result was an abundance of tweets riddled with spelling mistakes and people being forced into deleting and posting again, a practice undoubtedly driving the number of actions per user up, an interesting point for thought.
Having said that Twitter has officially started rolling out an edit button. The tool will be granted initially to employees and influencers, with the plan being rolling the feature out to the rest of the user base further on, following its current testing phase.
Users are then left pondering what the effects of this feature will be on the long-standing platform, the reality being that there most likely aren’t going to be any. This is because under each edited tweet a history of the older versions is displayed, meaning users will know the exact time of editing as well as the specific changes made. It is then clear that the effects of this long-awaited feature will be strictly positive and its implementation shall serve as further proof that even the biggest platforms are ready to leave their roots for the benefit of their users.
References
Christ Stokel Walker (2022), Wired: Twitter Finally Gets an Edit Button [online] accessed 06/10/2022, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-gets-an-edit-button#:~:text=An%20edit%20button%20could%20be,a%20larger%20group%20of%20users
Ivan Mehta (2022). Twitter is finally rolling out an edit button later this month, [online] accessed 07/10/2022, https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/01/twitter-is-finally-rolling-out-an-edit-button-later-this-month-first-to-twitter-blue-subscribers/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMS7pVxYq_VkLdDVDrZbLUy-bOMgbMhj3Og3sH_PufAremBSGYKQpmaGEDqltmmQbXvNWhjypH6QgFUaKkUICe9A-6kwDJVdvEep48R817vh7H1g3g2XWFsDzB8ShbiaEKHfQWbjwe4p5-P_VAazC7Un1TxktvjGhS5253-zK4tz
