Whatever Elon Musk is doing or not doing with his $44 million, changes are afoot at Twitter. On Thursday, the app announced that it would finally be rolling out an “edit” button after years of regretful tweeters campaigning for the ability to tweak their little musings. The function, per Twitter’s blog post, will be available to the app’s internal team first and then expanded to Twitter Blue subscribers later this month.
“No one wants this!” you are probably screaming into your typo-ridden timeline. It’s true, Twitter’s innate chaos is largely dependent on the fact that you can post short, terrible takes with one click and never look back. Let it be the sordid, wildly misspelled cesspool that it is. People who care about typos? Nerds, all of them.
Thankfully, someone at Twitter knows this, because the edit button is a deceptive little trick. First of all, it’s only available for 30 minutes after you post, so you can’t retcon your years-old Breaking Bad takes into astute observations about the sexist concept of the male anti-hero. More importantly, the app will show your followers your edit history, exposing you as the sad little try-hard that you are. Did you go back and add a #PSL hashtag to your post about fall drinks? Embarrassing! Maybe you misspelled Meghan Markle’s name. Ha ha, there’s no covering that one up.
As previously mentioned, because Twitter is Twitter, this feature will only be available to the elite, i.e. whoever pays for Twitter Blue. This is fine by me, actually, because people who subscribe to early Twitter roll-out features are probably the same ones who care about typos, and I would frankly be thrilled to see seven different drafts of a Jeff Bezos tweet. Maybe there’s hope for our little bird app yet.