It happens to the best of us: You write up a comment on an Instagram post, hit send, and, whoops, realize you made a glaring typo. What do you do? Do you delete the comment, retype it, and submit again, doubling the notifications the poster will receive? Leave it, and hope others will overlook your foolish use of “it’s” instead of “its”? Neither option is great, but they’re the only two choices you have on Instagram, right?
No longer: On Thursday, Instagram announced some exciting news for frequent commenters: Going forward, you’ll be able to edit your Instagram comments. Whether you regret one part of your comment, or you only need to fix a mistake, this new feature lets you make adjustments without having to delete your comment entirely, catching up to other platforms that let you make similar edits.
Comment editing can be a slippery slope. If someone makes a controversial comment but edits it after other people comment en masse, it only creates confusion for users stumbling upon the chaos after the fact. Perhaps that’s why Instagram is adding some limitations here. First, you only have 15 minutes after posting a comment to edit it. This is how message editing works on platforms like Apple’s Messages app—you only have a finite amount of time to adjust your comments before they’re set in stone. Once that 15 minute window is up, your comment is locked to your last edit.
What’s more, when you do edit your comments, Instagram places an “Edited” label next to it—letting everyone know you 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 that 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 need to delete the entire thing to remove that image.
What do you think so far?
Once you make a comment on an Instagram post, you should now see a new “Edit” button appear next to “Replay” and “Share on Threads.” Tap it, and your comment will appear in the text field again. Make your adjustments, then tap the “Send” button again. Remember: You only have 15 minutes from when you first made that comment to make your changes.
