Twitter's iOS and web users have started to notice the roll-out of a number of changes this month, and the biggest change involves threaded conversations. On May 5, the social media company announced that a simpler and more organized interface for replies was on the way, although the company made it clear that any changes might not be final.
"Your conversations are the heart of Twitter, so we're testing ways to make them easier to read and follow," the Twitter Support account wrote at the time.
Now the company has more to say. On May 20, the company announced they are testing out a feature that will allow people the opportunity to control who can respond to their tweets. Users will be able to choose between their followers, people they @ mention, or you can do it as it's always been done and open it up to everyone. "A conversation on Twitter can get noisy and hard to follow. For a more meaningful convo experience, we're testing something new. As you compose a new Tweet, you can open replies to everyone, people you follow, or just people you @ mention," the company—you guessed it—tweeted.
The above feature, which was called Conversation Participants, was previously reported on back in January as something Twitter was looking into. "Getting ratio’d, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think aren’t as healthy are definitely part of...our thinking about this," Twitter's Director of Product Management Suzanne Xie said while at CES 2020.
Threaded conversations on Twitter can become notoriously messy and hard to follow, but the new interface currently being tested definitely tidies up the timeline.
This isn't the only test the company is rolling out to users. "We're also experimenting with placing like, retweet, and reply icons behind a tap for replies," the company said in early May. "We're trying this with a small group on iOS and web to see how it affects following and engaging with a convo."
Regardless of whether the changes stick around, it's already an improvement over the current chaos of Twitter replies.
