I can already see you rolling your eyes. “Oh wow, Scott. What a fresh take on Twitter. Nobody’s ever complained about how we can’t edit tweets before.”
Well, follow me on this journey. I promise you the destination will be unexpected, and worth your time.
I’m a writer first and foremost, but digital product design is my second-favourite digital passion. I fell in love with digital product design by accident. I was working at a job I loved and my manager asked me if I wanted to transition into digital product management. I told him I was quite satisfied with the job I had and I really had no experience as a digital product manager. He told me that they were eliminating my position so if I didn’t accept his offer, I would be let go. So began my love affair with digital product design!
It turned out I loved everything about my new job. Striking the balance between user and business needs. Leveraging new technologies to create innovative websites. I truly geeked out on making wireframes. They were like blueprints but for websites. I loved all of it. And I like to think I became really good at it.
The beauty of Twitter’s design is in its simplicity. Much like Google, it’s everything it needs to be, and nothing more. Well, at least it started out that way. Anyway, there’s one sorely lacking feature that continues to puzzle all of its users. Why can’t we edit tweets?
There have probably been millions of tweets and thousands of articles trying to analyze this question, and I’m not going to attempt to do that because I’ve determined the lack of this feature makes absolutely no sense from either a user or business perspective. So what’s the deal?
The only logical conclusion I can come to is that billionaire Twitter co-founder and current CEO @jack is a troll who enjoys torturing his users because he knows most of us are hopelessly addicted and, as much as we whine about this, we’re still going to keep tweeting. It’s like a meth addict complaining that this batch isn’t quite the same pretty shade of blue as the last one.
I’ve posted over 21,000 tweets in the 11 years I’ve been on that hellsite. This is not a fact I’m proud of. In fact, when I really take the time to think about it, I’m reminded of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons when he’s about to be directly hit by a neutron bomb.
Since @jack obviously has no intention of ever adding an edit option, what do I think he should do? Well, I’m glad you asked.
I think he should double down and remove the delete feature.
I can hear the shrieks from typophobes like me, who will delete a tweet and write it again if one single letter is out of place. Sure, that would kind of suck, but hear me out here.
What about those people out there who maybe you don’t like so much, who tweet when they’re drunk, high, feeling kind of racist, or some combination of the three? They post that regrettable tweet, go to bed, wake up to see a ton of mentions on their phone and recoil in horror at the irrecoverable damage they have done.
Now imagine you waking up, enjoying your morning coffee, and seeing that horrific tweet that not-so-great person posted last night. “Oh ho! That person is definitely getting fired!” How fun would that be?
Embrace the chaos, people. Like The Joker, maybe @jack just wants to watch the Internet burn.
Scott Likes Tech 