Twitter Teases Quasi Edit Feature

Twitter is notorious throwing a bunch of new features onto its platform while never giving users what they really want: an edit button.

On Tuesday, the site teased that it was experimenting with exactly that, writing "Our friends
@Brizzly are back! We’re excited about their new Tweet compose & auto-deletion tools. They even built…an edit feature!"

Our friends @Brizzly are back! We’re excited about their new Tweet compose & auto-deletion tools. They even built…an edit feature!🙃 Check them out 👇 https://t.co/p7Hbt4qxPF

— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) March 10, 2020

While this sounds wonderful, the thing with Brizzly's tools is that they're not really an edit feature at all. Instead, Brizzly, a subscription service, made an undo feature, which allows users to undo sending a tweet if they notice a typo within the first ten minutes of posting and re-send it. Mashable compared it to Gmail's "recall" feature, which allows users to un-send an email after a short period of time.

Jack Dorsey has been adamant about not adding an "edit" feature to the site for fear of how it would be abused. It's easy to see how a widely-retweeted post could be edited to completely change its meaning. If anything, this "undo" experiment is likely as close as Twitter will ever get to a true "edit" button.

The disappointing tease is yet another feature that has Twitter users disappointed. Last week, the team announced experimenting with disappearing tweets known as Fleets, which caused #RIPTwitter to trend.