Twitter's Jack Dorsey Finally Explains Why There's No Edit Button

January 15th, 2020 - 5:10 PM EST by Matt Schimkowitz

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jack dorsey answering questions for wired

For as long as there has been Twitter, people have clamored for an edit button. Apparently, it's very easy to be misconstrued or include a typo in the world's most famous micro-blogging platform. But after more than a decade of criticism, Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey is putting his food down: There will be no edit button, at least in the foreseeable future.

In a video for Wired, Dorsey took questions from his website, which inevitably brought the edit button to his attention. However, because the company wants to "preserve that vibe and that feeling" of sending an SMS text message, which is how the company began as a text message company, they aren't adding it.

"The answer is no," said Jack Dorsey to whether the edit button would be made available in 2020. "The reason there's no edit button and there hasn't been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS text messaging service. So as you all know, when you send a text, you can't really take it back."

Dorsey goes a little further in-depth in the problems associated with editing tweets. The primary concern is that if a tweet that had been retweeted and broadcasted to a wider audience, what would happen if the original tweet were edited and the content was changed.

However, there's still hope for those who just want a chance to fix a typo or two.

"We've considered a 1-minute window or a 30-second window to correct something," he said. "But that also means that we have to delay sending that tweet out because once it's out, people see it. So these are all the considerations. It's just work but we'll probably never do it."

That wasn't the only question posed to Dorsey. One brave soul asked him how to get verified. He replied:

There’s a guy named Kayvon, and he handles all the verification, which is the blue checkmark. So if you either DM him, or mention him, you have a high probability of getting a blue checkmark. So it’s @K-A-Y-V-Z. Verification, he’s the verification god. So just go to him and he’ll get you sorted.

The joke went over just as Dorsey intended, with people flooding his employee's Twitter account with verification requests. He must be a great guy to work for.



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