There was an amazing account on reddit for a while whose name was something like EditedToMakeYouLookStupid (that wasn't quite exactly it, though, I don't think) that would set up traps and then, well, edit their comment to make your response look stupid ;P.
It's hard to imagine a company sabotaging their primary purpose as actively. This is such a tough situation. Every user wants to be able to update their stuff, rewrite their words. But the public function, the utility of twitter is as a system of record, a forum for interaction. Edit threatens to blow up the primary value of the network, it's attestability. What happened when.
Mastodon has this right: it's "Delete & Redraft". Start over. You don't get to keep your timestamp. When you say something is as important as what you say. Letting this blur together, destroying Twitter as a part of the record would be an incalculable loss to the platform. Yet it's something that countless users all want and demand. Technically fairly uninteresting: but this is a very hard product trade off to make.
> we're kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.
A highly demanded feature on Twitter comes with a price to pay for it each month on Twitter Blue. Did they (Twitter users) really think it was going to be free?
Regardless, congratulations! You have done user research for the shareholders to justify them to put the edit button behind a Twitter Blue subscription. Let's see if it comes with edit history.
Ultimately, I hope that with Twitter Shops coming, lots of people listened to the buy signal: [0] Unfortunately, I don't think anyone did. Only after Musk discloses his shares, retail buys in late. (again).
I imagine their systems have changed a lot, but 10+ years ago I heard the key reason for not implementing this at the time was due to how heavily denormalized and append-heavy their data model was. (Though they always had a mechanism for deletion, so..)
When I first used Twitter, it was by registering my phone number and texting a specific number to tweet. Would be hard to make an edit with that interface.
