I experienced a small glitch a moment ago when I went back to edit one of my posts - the edit button had disappeared! While I realised this was probably just a temporary error (the button has since come back), for a moment I thought it might have been intentional. My initial reaction was one of surprise, but then I wondered for a moment: might this be a good thing?
One of the most important lessons anyone can learn about using the internet is that once you post something, it's there forever. As many of us have probably experienced (possibly after drunk posting on Facebook) we can come to regret certain things we've said online and want to change them - this is what the edit button's for, after all. But that doesn't mean the original post has vanished from the web, and it can still come back to haunt you - as plenty of public figures have discovered, no doubt to their enduring embarrassment. Here's just one of many articles on "deleted" tweets that live on in infamy.
Posting on Steemit would be an interesting experience without the ability to edit. For a start, it could improve the quality of posting by encouraging people to pay more attention to what they write, and do some proper proofreading before clicking the post button, instead of just typing madly in an effort to get as many posts out as possible.
It would also remove an easy, but somewhat inaccurate method for people to bump their posts back up to the active page (which, if you didn't know, is as simple as clicking the edit button).
More than anything, it would be important training for internet users in the reality that what happens on the internet stays on the internet - for good.
While it's nice to be able to go back and correct your mistakes, it's better to get it right the first time. Eliminating editing on Steemit probably won't happen, but it's an interesting possibility nonetheless. What do you think?