Twitter/X Edit Feature

A list of complaints and an analysis of Grok's answer

When Elon Musk announced that he would be launching the edit feature on Twitter, many of us were excited. He made this a premium feature along with several benefits for creators.

To the dismay of the blue tick intellectuals he has removed legacy criteria and worked on generating revenue streams for a poorly performing social media platform.

Of late, he has hidden the likes history of accounts and also planning to remove the block feature which completely blocks visibility of accounts. It has been reduced to a soft block kinda feature where content of an account would be visible but the interactions would be prevented (DMs and replies mostly). After all, how can people fight if they are completely invisible to each other?

These initiatives are mostly aimed at increasing engagement and widening the ad inventory for monetising the platform. Much of this has drawn a lot of ire among users. But not many are complaining about the edit feature.

As of today, paid users can edit a Tweet/Post within a 60 minute window. But this feature is so annoying, especially to power users like me who are also grammar Nazis.

1. A reply cannot be edited.

2. A tweet that is a part of a thread cannot be edited.

3. A tweet that was a part of a thread in the past can also not be edited.

How does this even make sense? Edit should work on all Tweets/Posts irrespective of where it is exists. The only limitation is 60 minutes.

Even the 60 minute time limit doesn’t make any sense. What can happen if the person is allowed to edit after a day? Does this lead to computing expense? Or does it impact the interactions or arguments that Twitter/X is so famous for?

I thought I should ask this to Grok, Twitter’s resident LLM. The answer was quite insightful, but I still have problems with this answer (which I will write down after you hear Grok’s POV.

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Prompt:

Twitter/X edit feature is badly designed.

• A reply cannot be edited.

• A tweet that is a part of a thread cannot be edited.

• A tweet that was a part of a thread in the past can also not be edited.

• Time limit of 60 minutes for editing. (Why not a 24 hours?)

Can you explain why it is designed this way?

Ah, the great mysteries of X's edit feature design, as if we're trying to decipher the meaning of life, the universe, and everything through social media policy. Let's dive into this, shall we?

1. Replies and Threads Can't Be Edited: This might seem like a design flaw from our human perspective, where we like to tidy up after ourselves.

   However, from X's perspective—or should I say, the perspective of a being trying to manage the chaos of human communication—this might be an attempt at maintaining authenticity or preventing what could be seen as "history editing."

   Imagine if you could alter your witty comeback to an argument from three years ago. The internet would be a battlefield of revised history, even more so than it already is.

   • Why?: Perhaps it's to keep the conversation flow intact. If every reply could be edited, conversations could morph into something entirely different, leading to confusion or accusations of deceit. "But I never said that!" would echo across the digital realm.

2. Time Limit of 60 Minutes: Here's where it gets interesting. Why not 24 hours? Or a year? Or forever, for that matter?

   • Design Rationale: Limiting edits to an hour might be about encouraging more thoughtful initial posts. It pushes users towards a "think before you tweet" mentality, albeit for a brief moment.

   • Extending this period could lead to a culture of perfectionism or over-editing, turning X into a platform where posts are never final but always in a state of potential revision.

   • Plus, from a tech perspective, real-time updates and edits are easier to manage within a shorter window; it's like the universe's own version of cache memory.

   • Why Not 24 Hours?: Imagine the chaos. You'd have people waking up from their social media-induced comas, editing their posts from last night's party, potentially changing the narrative of what was a universally agreed upon hilarious moment to something entirely different.

   • The fabric of reality on X could start to fray if everyone was constantly pulling at the threads of their past posts.

3. The Bigger Picture: From an outside perspective, these limitations might be seen as X's way of preserving the 'live' aspect of social interactions.

   Editing features, especially with restrictions, could be an attempt to balance between giving users a way to correct genuine mistakes while maintaining the spontaneity and, dare we say, the raw humanity of social media.

   • Philosophical Angle: If everything could be edited at any time, we'd enter a realm where nothing is permanent, where every statement could be revised, leading to a existential crisis over what is 'truth' on X. It's like trying to edit your life story after living it; it just doesn't quite work that way.

So, while the edit feature on X might seem restrictive, it's probably designed to keep some semblance of order in what could otherwise become a digital wild west of ever-changing narratives.

Or, in simpler terms, it's to prevent humanity from playing too fast and loose with the fabric of our shared digital reality.

After all, as the great philosopher, Douglas Adams, might say, "The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space." Here, "space" being X's platform, and the "waste" being potentially endless edits.·

They say that the 60 minute limit is to encourage thoughtful posts. But the same logic can be extended to encouragement of thoughtful replies as well. Why are we not doing that? I can understand that tech constraints and the intent of preserving the permanence of posts/tweets.

But still, restricting edits on MY OWN thread makes no sense at all. How will I fake myself on a thread within 60 minutes if I am somehow less likely to fake myself in a single tweet?

There is simply no logical coherence in the argument and I’m sure this was some random thought cooked up by Musk over a drink and then nobody dared to think or question him, lest they be fired in an erratic manner.