[mushyhammer]

Unlike GitHub, tweets should not be editable forever. I think 5 minutes is reasonable. Even HN has an edit time limit. I hope they also limit how much you can tweets (even though, in reality, adding 4 characters (“not ”) is destructive enough.

[eatonphil]

Do you think HTML pages should be uneditable after a period of time? Regardless of your opinion there (since I can see the merits), the rest of the web isn't exactly founded on immutability.

[mushyhammer]

But Twitter doesn’t want to be just another webpage. Tweets and its dates are used in court and by historians. That’s basically why Twitter has been hesitant to allow edits.

I kinda wish they let people add some text instead of allowing editing, like:

    Wouldnt it be nice?

    Added: * wouldn’t

I know deletions are still allowed, but they don’t lead to different content.

[eatonphil]

I'm sure that web pages and their dates are used in court and by historians.

[awb]

The web has archive.org for that. Or, ‘download webpage’ from a browser.

[unholiness]

Archive.org works on twitter too?

[zimpenfish]

> Archive.org works on twitter too?

Maybe if you're a famous celebrity etc. but it's scraped mine 5 times since 2007 (and the "expand conversation" links don't work) and I promise you that it has been fairly active ever since I signed up.

[BeFlatXIII]

Is it Twitter's responsibility to be an accurate archive for courts and historians?

[mushyhammer]

It’s not the responsibility, but if you read their post it’s obviously their concern.

[nkozyra]

I see the argument, though. Edits in a conversation break context and flow.

[bombcar]

HN has edits, in conversation and flow, and it does break sometimes, but in general it's a good.

Discussion forums have had edits forever; reddit famously lets you go and delete all your existing posts at anytime by replacing them with "edited by autodeleter9000".

[ncallaway]

I think the other option would be to have a longer window, but then have edits of “popular” tweets require a manual review and approval.

Links and uploaded media should not be editable.

[melony]

Then you need to hire humans and it costs money. An edit history is much cheaper.