Put aside the engineering challenges and culture wars for a moment to ask yourself: What is the true advantage in editing our posts? For all the potentially negative consequences, you’d imagine there’d at least be an upside. Maybe news organizations’ social-media editors won’t have to delete an incorrect statement on a breaking story and then post a new version, but that’s always worked fine, and a direct edit requires no less effort. Most individual Twitter creators could just be fixing the unimportant misspellings in their successful posts, or (a numbingly tedious prospect) tinkering with syntax, word choice, and punctuation in hopes of salvaging a flop. To edit is, in a sense, to overthink.
This cuts against the ethos of Twitter. If the typo you discover only after thousands of accounts have shared your joke is frustrating, it’s also sort of charming—the flaw that keeps you humble and adds to the freewheeling chaos of a platform in perpetual motion. And if you can’t live with the embarrassment, you can nobly sacrifice that engagement, which after all is meaningless, by scrubbing the tweet whole from your feed. An edit, by comparison, is too self-consciously controlling, a pathetic grasp at order where none belongs.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member