In a Q&A, Jack Dorsey discusses Twitter's thinking around an edit button and says “we'll probably never do it”
the edit function will only add bends to that maze. https://twitter.com/...
The VergeJames Vincent
Context & Ripple Effects
Jack Dorsey's 'probably never' closes a loop he himself opened: in late 2016 he told Recode Twitter was thinking a lot about an edit-tweet button, bundling it with bookmarks, better threading, and multiple interest-based timelines as the product wishlist. Three years on, the same CEO rules it out, framing edits as bends added to an already-mazelike conversation.
What makes the reversal notable is that it did not hold. By April 2022 Twitter said it had been working on edit since the prior year and would test it in Twitter Blue Labs, and leaked site code showed the mechanism: an edit creates a new tweet while listing the old tweets before the edit — an append-only design that quietly honors the integrity concern behind Dorsey's 'never.'
First-order effects
Users who want typo fixes or clarifications get no native recourse, keeping the public tweet record immutable by default while Dorsey runs the company.
Second-order effects
When the feature finally ships, it lands inside the Twitter Blue subscription rather than as a free default — converting a years-long user request into a paywall driver, with the append-only implementation preserving the version history that justified the original refusal.
Third-order effects
The pattern points to marquee product decisions flipping with monetization strategy rather than stated principle: 'never' positions survive until a subscription tier needs a flagship perk, making executive absolutes unreliable guides to platform roadmaps.
The trend: Long-deferred social platform features are increasingly monetized as subscription perks, with hard 'never' stances reversing once a paywall exists to carry them.
This is great. @jack sat with @Wired's video team and answered all kinds of questions crowdsourced from @Twitter. (Including, you know, about the edit button.) https://www.youtube.com/...
@Techmeme @jjvincent such a dumb rationale: that it could be used maliciously. simple versioning eliminates this. give a limited time window for making one single edit (10 min?) restrict the edit to simple modify/replace of two words, one of which can be a link (btw, why don't yo…
If Twitter really wanna get the SMS vibe, they should also remove the delete tweet button because “you can't really get the text back once you sent it” https://twitter.com/...
As much as I wish I could edit at least typos and awkward phrasing an edit button would probably lead to more chaos and disinegnousness, not less. Unless it had idk, a time limit. https://twitter.com/...
Good. They shouldn't. This site is already a mis/disinformation labyrinth — the edit function will only add bends to that maze. https://twitter.com/...