Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/15/twitter-ceo-says-no-to-an.html
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Maybe they could have compromised with a timed edit function but I actually think this is pretty fair. Edits are ripe for nasty trolling. Sure, they could add logs or whatever but that just adds complexity and not really transparency.
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Ok, next do nazis, Jack.
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Twitter is toxic by design. Dunno if they intended it that way, but you simply could not design a system that would more damaging to our cultural dialog. Truncated, hierarchical, unidirectional communication is good for public announcements and pretty much nothing else.
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There’s a delete button right? Seems like enough.
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I wonder if Jack thought and dreamed as a child that he would become a mouth-piece for tyranny.
edit: on that note 
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Never joined. Never will. This decision seems smarter to me with each passing day.
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“Seems” is such a slippery word.
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So is “is” if you’re being slippery.
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in its original form and intent, twitter essentially was basically a public announcement system.
this was a pretty entertaining video. does he do these regularly? he’s a funny guy.
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I find the lack of an edit button annoying just because I’ll tap out a tweet on my phone, send it and realize I misspelled something or have some half completed thought fragment in the middle. I just copy the text, delete it and re-type it.
I definitely could see it adding a lot of complexity behind the scenes that Jack (ass) wouldn’t want to pay for and no doubt people would try to revise old tweets they regret. However, it could done with a Wiki-like edit history.
As I said, it’s inconvenient but I don’t really care that much either.
I am a little lost as to how Twitter is any more toxic and damaging to our cultural dialog than any other social media site.
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That quote is not by Voltaire, it is usually atributed to the neo-nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, which changes the implied meaning a bit
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It’s probably not relevant anymore, but Twitter was originally tightly coupled with SMS and SMS doesn’t have a mechanism to edit a sent message either. Of course they didn’t have a delete button either yet Twitter figured that one out.
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As George Washington Famously said, before crossing the Delaware,
“Don’t trust the internet”
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A couple of reasons:
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Every tweet is basically yelled in front of a giant open door to the entire internet. You can’t control who sees it, nor prevent anyone from replying to you in a way that forces you to see it (unless you go one by one and block thousands of people). There’s no way to avoid hateful bile that comes in floods when speaking about any number of topics that anger fragile straight cis white men.
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The extreme length limit on content makes it almost impossible to have any kind of nuanced or respectful dialog on anything, except in the form of the maddening “threads” which are difficult to follow and reply to in a coherent way.
In general, it makes the Bad Internet “opt-out” instead of “opt-in”
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Someone needs to shoulder-surf Jack Dorsey to see if his copy of the app has an edit button.
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Wait, don’t you guys do what I do? Write out all of your tweets longhand, scan and OCR them, copy and paste them into a libreoffice doc, do a spell-check and word count, email them to my wife for copy editing, then ask my niecessistant to queue them up in hootsuite.
foolproof.
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What?! You don’t fax them to your wife and make an extra photocopy for your files?
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What can I say, I’m on the millennial cusp, and have fallen into their dark ways.
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Eh, some of the humor is pretty nice. Except of course people start complaining that their jokes are getting stolen, and other people start debating what is or is not funny.
I’m still not sure if it’s better to share an image of a tweet or to share a link to the tweet itself. If you share the image, people can’t click through to see the source, but if you share the link, then the tweet might be deleted later. Decisions, decisions.
Of course, in the end the important thing is that we can keep calling people “twits”, haha.
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