Twitter’s edit button has always been a joke, but it’s finally officially a reality – Jane Manchun Wong, on a mission to find hidden features in company code, just gave us our first real look at what it might look like.
As you might expect, the editing part is pretty straightforward: you press a button called “Edit Tweet” in the drop-down context menu, and you can edit the tweet. Currently, it looks like you’ll hit that button within 30 minutes of posting the tweet; it opens a window with your entire original content in front of you, and you can post whatever you like – delete the whole thing and re- start. It’s not just because of typos.
The currently unpublished version of Edit Tweet re-uploads media (images, videos, GIFs, etc.) instead of reusing them. Inefficient use of bandwidth and media processing power can also be lossy. Plus it turns my video into an image (mishandled media type) pic.twitter.com/HjoIA0CZhO
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 2, 2022
Of course, the bigger question is what happens afterward — how can readers tell if you messed up your tweet after the fact and what you messed up? It’s also fairly simple: a little “edited” button will appear next to the timestamp, and you can click it to go to the “edit history” page, which should theoretically show all previous versions of the tweet.
(Ignore the “edit: soup” bit in the tweet above, which Wong added was for dramatic effect.)
Importantly, as Wong mentioned a few weeks ago, Twitter appears to be making every tweet immutable — each version has its own ID, none of them get deleted, and it’s unclear what Twitter’s Whether the backend will automatically propagate the latest version on the network.For example, if you are reading edge Old embedded stories are rewritten, will you now see new tweets or old ones? Not sure!
But even if you’re viewing an old, unedited version of a tweet, Twitter will prompt you. See the “new version of this tweet” below? If you click on it, it should immediately take you to the latest version.
To summarize, Wong told me that she thinks perhaps Works this way:
Trump initially tweets “covefe”, tweet gets ID #1, people embed ID #1
Trump then creates a new edit “coffee”, the new edit (technically a new tweet) gets ID #2, and the original tweet (#1) becomes the first version of the tweet
Then in the embedded tweet still pointing to #1, the “This tweet has a new version” indicator is now displayed
I feel reasonable.it does sound like a solution edge Contributing editor Casey Newton suggested in 2017:
I came up with an option in the Tweet’s inverted caret dropdown that reads: “Edit Tweet”. Click it and you can correct any errors and republish. The new version is available on Twitter wherever the tweet exists, including retweets and quoted tweets. Next to the tweet’s timestamp, a prominent new word appeared: “edited.” Click on the word and Twitter will display previous versions of the tweet below the latest tweet.
Except here, it sounds like edit history may be a different page instead of unfolding neatly underneath.
Keep in mind that Wong has not been able to post any completed, edited tweets to Twitter’s actual backend, so these findings are Very Tentative. She got the hang of it all by running the application on the client side and letting her see the user interface in action.