>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.
Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)
That is a good point. I like to say `s/foo/bar/` to correct myself rather than edit the message. This is also important if people are receiving e-mail notifications for new messages but not for message edits.
Honestly, invisible edits are a UI problem that people really ought to solve - highlight (or in some way indicate with a color change or such) that something has been edited (and specifically, what has changed vs what is unedited in the comment).
Or perhaps restrict editing, e.g. instead of being able to delete text, you can only strike through+slightly shrink+grey out text.
Not that I really like Facebook, but that's one thing they handled well with their comments. You can click on the edited link associated with a particular comment that was edited and see all versions of the comment.
So if someone edited their comment three times, you would be able to read all four versions of it.
Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.
Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)