What is the technical reason that so many social media sites don't allow you to edit your text?

Posted by Edward Tanguay on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Edward Tanguay
Published on 2011-03-04T22:59:48Z Indexed on 2011/03/04 23:32 UTC
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user-interface

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user-experience

A common complaint I hear about Facebook, Twitter, Ning and other social sites is that once a comment or post is made, it can't be edited.

I think this goes against one of the key goals of user experience: giving the user agency, or the ability to control what he does in the software.

Even on Stackexchange sites, you can only edit the comments for a certain amount of time.

Is the inability for so many web apps to not allow users to edit their writing a technical shortcoming or a "feature by design"?

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