It happens to the best of us: You write a comment on an Instagram post, press send, and, oh, you realize you’ve made an obvious typo. What do you do? Do you delete the comment, retype it, and resubmit, which will double the notices the poster receives? Leave it in, and hope others will ignore your silly use of “it’s” instead of “it’s”? Neither option is great, but those are the only two options you have on Instagram, right?
No more: on thursday, Instagram announces some exciting news for frequent commenters: Going forward, you will be able to edit your Instagram comments. Whether you regret a part of your comment, or you just need to fix a mistake, this new feature lets you make adjustments to your comment without completely deleting it, connecting you to other platforms that let you make similar edits.
Comment editing can be a slippery task. If someone makes a controversial comment but edits it after other people have commented en masse, it only creates confusion for users who are facing chaos after the fact. Maybe that’s why Instagram is adding some limits here. First, you only have 15 minutes to edit a comment after it’s posted. This is how message editing works on platforms like Apple’s Messages app — you have a limited amount of time to adjust your comments before they’re sent out. Once that 15 minute window ends, your comment is locked for your final edit.
Plus, when you edit your comments, Instagram puts an “Edited” label next to it – letting everyone know that you’ve changed the comment in some way. Instagram doesn’t make it possible to view the edit history, so no one will be able to see what you said before the last edit – unless, of course, someone took a screenshot of one of your previous comment versions. Also, you can only edit text comments, not images. If you post a comment with an image, you’ll have to delete the entire thing to remove that image.
What do you think so far?
Once you’ve commented on an Instagram post, you should now see a new “The “Edit” button appears next to “Replay” and “Share on threads.” Tap it, and your comment will reappear in the text field. Make your adjustments, then tap the “Send” button again. Remember: You only have 15 minutes to make changes from when you first made that comment.
