You whimpered and you complained and you moaned. And no, you’re not getting the “Edit Tweet” button, but Twitter is testing something almost as good. Will do you happy?
Users have long demanded, and Twitter has repeatedly refused to implement, a tool that would allow them to modify the content of tweets already sent. Even so, users will soon be able to stop being embarrassed in the next best way (or maybe in a totally superior way): tweets before they actually air.
Per 9to5Mac, reverse engineering specialist and prolific data miner Jane Manchun Wong found that Twitter is working on a “unsubscribe” timer for tweets, which seems to give users about five seconds after tweeting to rethink whether that was a really good idea. It’s not the same thing as an edit button, but it helps to solve the problem of sending and immediately notice that a message has a grammatical error, it was in response to the wrong user, it was just reckless, or was completely ignorant.
It is unclear when the undo feature can be implemented or if it is just a test that may never reach users, but Twitter has been in an engineering binge lately. Many of the features announced or launched in the past few months are clones of other popular sites and applications, including their own clones of Clubhouse hangout audio chat, disappearance of Instagram stories, monetizable Substack newsletters, and Patreon Subscriptions.
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The edit button has been one of Twitter’s most requested features, but CEO Jack Dorsey said last year that it will be almost certain never be implemented because it’s not like you can retrieve a text message too. (The difference here is that the risk of tweeting can be a little higher than sending text messages, depending on how many people read it. And the Wayback Machine is relentless.) Has other obvious disadvantages of an editing feature, such as the certainty that one of its greatest uses would be to mislead other Twitter users by inducing them to respond or send quotes to posts that suddenly say something completely different.
“We started as an SMS service, a text message. And as everyone knows, when you send a text message, you can’t really get it out, ”said Dorsey. on a YouTube video when discussing the perspectives of an edit button. “We wanted to preserve that vibration, that feeling, in the first days … We will probably never do that.”
For now, you will just have to be content to pretend you never clicked send, which is probably the best.