Considering edit button but can't rush it, says Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

New Delhi, Nov 12: Twitteratis have been asking for an edit button for the longest time. But that may still be some time away as the company does not want to "rush it" and will take a considered view of a use case for allowing individuals to make changes to their tweets.

"We have been considering edit for quite some time but we have to do the right way. We can't just rush it out. We have to make sure that we are actually solving the predominant reason why people would do it first and foremost and not making something that is distracting or takes anything away from the public record...," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said.

Speaking at a townhall at IIT-Delhi, the top executive said many users have been asking for the edit button because they want to correct mistakes like spelling errors or adding the wrong URL.

"...That's a lot more achievable than allowing people to edit any tweet all the way back in time...Ultimately, we need to make sure that we are solving a real problem and solving a use case that people seeing as a friction in the service and making that easy for people," Dorsey said.

On his maiden visit to India, Dorsey met Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama and Congress President Rahul Gandhi.

Addressing the students at an hour-long townhall, the Twitter co-founder answered a multitude of questions ranging from topics like best and worst decisions, changes needed in education system and impact of social media on youth globally.

In response to a question, Dorsey said the followers count no longer matters and users should rather focus on having meaningful conversations.

Having founded Twitter with Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006, Dorsey said the follower count was designed to encourage engagement on the platform.

"...We made it (follower number) bold and the font size a little bigger than everything else on the page and we didn't think much and we moved on to the next thing to create.

"What that has done is we put all the emphasis, not intending to, on that number of how many people follow me. So, if that number is big and bold, what do people want to do with it? They want to make it go up," he said.

He further said: "It may have been right way back then 12 years ago but I don't think it's right today...I think a more interesting number is how many conversations do you contribute to in your network, how many healthy conversations do you have".

Talking about bad decisions made, Dorsey spoke of how he -- in the early years of the company -- was afraid of letting some "amazing" engineers as he feared that doing so would bring down the platform even though these staff had negative attitude.

He reminisced that six months later, when some of these people were let go, the site indeed went down but also some other team members stepped up as leaders in the situation.

Advising would-be entrepreneurs, Dorsey said it is important that these businesses and algorithms based on new technologies like artificial intelligence are built with a "sense of ethical and moral responsibility" as this will affect lives of people.