If you are a tweeter at heart and also a fierce perfectionist with your spelling you will have found yourself in the tedious situation of having to delete a tweet, write it again and republish it. That’s why many times you simply ignore the error. This and many other things have made people claim an option to edit a tweet. However, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, has explained why we can never do it, or at least not in the coming days, weeks and months.
In a meeting with Wired Joack Dorsey revealed some curious facts about Twitter. For example, did you know that the bluebird of the logo has a name? And did you know it was Larry, named in honor of Larry Bird, the former NBA player of the Boston Celtics? Probably not. And, like the millions of users of the secure platform, you also didn’t know why the hell they never gave you an option to edit your tweets. But after all, there is a reason:
The reason why there is no button to edit and there has not been one traditionally is that we started as a text messaging service in SMS. So as you know, when you send a message you can no longer delete it. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling of our first days.
But for Dorsey, it is not just a sentimental issue, because the lack of the option to edit is a part of the identity of the platform and allows users to quote a tweet or retweet it without fear that it will be modified later. Although yes, nothing prevents someone from deleting it from nothing.
And for the spelling maniacs who have to delete a tweet to publish it again without errors, there is a possibility that Twitter implements a way to correct that kind of thing. One way of doing so would be to offer a small period of time between the moment the user sends the tweet and the moment it is published to be able to edit it in that space, similar to what happens in the Facebook Messenger or in the mails of Gmail However, “we probably never will,” Dorsey said.