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Comment by gen_greyface | Hacker News Reader

even better if twitter itself has a feature where it shows a tweet's edit history

I assume twitter will absolutely show a 'this tweet has been edited' button that brings up all the revisions of it, opens itself up to too much bait and switch nonsense otherwise.

This has been edited maybe, history doubtful.

They've done the user centric research & every user says they want to be able to change what they say online & escape their bad mistakes. The team has resounding data pushing them this direction. And it will be immensely immensely detrimental to the platform/service/medium.

The fact that users don't want their edit history visible is precisely why making it visible would be a useful tradeoff. Sure, you can fix your mistakes — but you have to balance whether the fix is worth sending up a flag (e.g. "This tweet has been edited") that may draw even more attention and scrutiny to the original tweet.

It's like the "Hidden replies" feature [0]. Sure someone can maliciously use it to hide valid criticism. But in doing so, they're essentially doing a public curation of "these are the replies which really rankled me"

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/twitter-rolls-out-its-hide...

The edit should just not affect existing likes & retweets?

i.e. more like a built-in 'delete and re-post', but with preserved metrics.

That wouldn't affect embeds, which is where a lot of abuse would likely come from.

Why couldn't it?

I think Reddit gets this right and Facebook Groups gets this wrong:

Facebook Groups: member-visible changelog

Reddit: you can edit the comment within 3 minutes with no "edited" sticker, but after 3 minutes if you edit then the comment's timestamp gets an asterisk next to it.

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