Twitter was one of the last social networks that had resisted adding in its ecosystem the ‘stories’ format that was first seen on Snapchat and was later incorporated and popularized by other social networks such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
The temporary content that will reach the social network will be called ‘Fleets’ and will be a new feature, which is still undergoing tests, which will allow publishing temporary tweets that are automatically deleted after 24 hours.
However, the reactions against it did not wait, a large number of users of the popular social network positioned #RIPTwitter, and one of the most repeated comments was “we do not want stories, we want to be able to edit the tweets”, something that the community has long enough demanding.
Surely you have asked yourself, why does Twitter ignore this request from its users? Is it so difficult to give me the possibility to modify my tweets? Or maybe a little more technical: what’s the problem is just replacing 130 characters in a database? Nothing from the other world and it’s even logical, right?
From our perspective (it has nothing to do with any official statement), although it seems easy, and indeed modifying a tweet (just modifying it) would not represent a major problem for Twitter developers, the reality is different, the problem is not only centered in changing a text that I wrote.
Let’s say I made a post, and I was wrong in spelling, what’s the problem in changing it, right? Well, none, in this case, I simply want to correct a spelling error.
But let’s say it is not a spelling mistake, rather it is grammatical, this can dramatically change the message I am giving, its meaning. Again, what is the problem that was an error that I wanted to correct by modifying the tweet? Now if it represents a problem, what happens if I got 10 likes and 20 retweets, from people who “agreed” with my publication, by changing it they would no longer agree, and those people could feel aggrieved and who knows with what consequences.
And a third case, someone deliberately publishes content with the intention of generating all possible interactions, and after achieving the objective the content changes, many people would be aggrieved from this action and the consequences could be devastating.
So what options would Twitter have?
Clear all interactions after modifying? This would generate discomfort in the users, in addition to being clear, for that, delete it and tweet it again.
Notify users who have interacted with a tweet that has been modified? Of course, it is possible, but with how many tweets a day do you interact? Would you like to receive endless notifications of this type? This doesn’t sound viable either.
An AI system that allows content to be analyzed? Ok, this sounds good, and it’s valid, as well as extremely expensive and complicated just to edit a tweet.
