Elon Musk, Twitter’s largest shareholder, asks customers if they need an edit button

Elon Musk, who lately turned Twitter’s largest shareholder, has posted a ballot on the web site asking customers whether or not they need an edit button. His choices are a misspelled “yse” and “on,” which could make you assume that the entire thing is joke till you see that the ballot has been retweeted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “The implications of this ballot shall be necessary. Please vote fastidiously,” Agrawal wrote, hinting that the ballot may result in an precise edit button on the social community. 

Many Twitter customers have requested for an edit button through the years, however the web site has remained staunchly immune to these requests. In a video Q&A with Wired again in 2020, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey stated the web site will “most likely by no means” add an edit button. He defined that the social community began as a textual content messaging service, and you may’t take again a textual content as soon as you have despatched it. Twitter apparently needed to protect that vibe and feeling.

Musk, who’s been a prolific tweeter manner earlier than he bought 9.2 p.c of the social community, may function the catalyst for the corporate to vary that outlook. As of this writing, 74.7 p.c out of the 1,439,779 accounts that participated within the ballot voted “yse” to an edit button. Whether or not Twitter will instantly begin engaged on the function if “yse” wins stays to be seen. That’s, if it hasn’t began growing it but — the official Twitter account lately posted that the corporate is “engaged on an edit button,” however that was on April Fools’ Day.

It is also unclear how an edit button would work on Twitter, the place reposting different folks’s content material is broadly practiced. If the one that tweeted the unique submit edits it, will the retweeted content material mirror the change, as nicely? And can the edit button for a tweet be accessible indefinitely or just for a brief time period? Dorsey stated in the course of the Wired interview that Twitter beforehand thought-about giving customers a 30-to-60-second window to right one thing, which might be greater than sufficient time to edit spelling errors and different minor modifications.