Twitter: "edit tweet" concept
I’ve been working on the “edit tweet” feature for Twitter since many users have been asking for this.
This may be the most required featured that users ask for Twitter to make.
And the list goes on… you can check it here.
We can build skyscrapers hundreds and hundreds of stories tall and thousands of feet tall with elevators that just shoot to the top in a matter of a minute or two but we can't edit out tweets. —MKBHD
How could it affect Twitter's experience?
If a tweet get a lot of retweets or likes and the OP edits it
If I tweet "I like [insert band name]" and get 10k retweets and 20k likes and then I edit it to "I hate [band name]". Not good!
Embedded Tweets
A lot of sites and blogs embed tweets, like whatI'm doing in this article. What if the user was able to edit their tweet? It may cause problems. Not good!
How could we solve those issues?
User cannot edit their tweet after Xs
After posting a tweet, the user can edit their tweet within 60s after posting it. It can be 60 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes. I don't know, I'll let Twitter try and see which works for them.
Why? The feature to edit a tweet is mainly focused on solving the issue when the user has a typo on their tweet. And it's something you usually realize a couple of seconds after tweeting.
Having the ability to edit the tweet anytime is risky and may cause a lot of problems. So let's play safe at the beginning since it's a new feature, it may need some testing before doing something big that changes the whole experience.
User cannot edit their tweet after a couple of interactions
If the tweet gets more than X likes or retweets, the user can no longer edit their tweet.
Why? Like explained before, the user may edit their tweet to something harmful or bad. So to prevent something bad to spread, the user can no longer edit their tweet after a couple of interactions. Again, playing safe.
How should do it?
I've been thinking about how should do it? So I took a look at how other websites does it.
You can only edit the post on Reddit in a period of 3 minutes If I recall correctly. It shows when the user edits it but doesn't show the edit history.
In another hand, Facebook let users edit what they post anytime they want and make it visible to anyone the edit history.
After looking at some examples around the web, I came to the conclusion that this new feature should be something more discreet. So I kept the UI basically the same and just added the text “Edited” if the tweet was edited.
And when the user clicks on the “Edited” text it will open the tweet with the edit history.
How the animations should look like and how it should work
Conclusion
Even though it may look something pretty simple for them to do, they still need to be really careful when adding a new feature. Recently they changed the "reply tweet" feature and so many users didn't like it, so they tweaked again.
Let me know if you think that by adding this feature can cause more issues or If you have a different way to solve it. Feedback please! :)
