> Dorsey was unusually direct: “The answer is no,” he says.
> “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," explains Dorsey. "So as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”
Jack really is just a blithering idiot. There are plenty of reasons you could give for not adding this feature, but that one, that's probably the worst.
Why though?
It's bad enough when online news sites edit their articles and a later version carries some different information with no or little hint that it was edited.
If you read the next paragraph in the article, he does say basically that.
> Though Twitter has evolved since its SMS days, Dorsey says the static, uneditable nature of posts remains an integral aspect of the platform, as it allows users to retweet and quote tweet others freely without fear that the message they amplified or critiqued could later be altered.
And that is vital. Retweets and quote tweets and replies just fall apart if the parent tweet can be freely edited. Time-limited typo fixing capability is one thing, arbitrary editing is quite another.
> Dorsey was unusually direct: “The answer is no,” he says.
> “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," explains Dorsey. "So as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”