This article was published on May 20, 2020

Twitter tests letting you choose who can reply to your tweets


Twitter tests letting you choose who can reply to your tweets

Twitter today revealed it’s testing a new feature that allows users to select who will be able to reply to your tweets before you send them.

It’s pretty straightforward, from what we can tell. It seems to work a bit like Facebook — you’ll see an option on your tweet that tells you who can reply to you. Select this and you’ll be able to limit it to people you follow, or to only the people you mention in the tweet. If you don’t mention anyone in the tweet, that last option will effectively keep anyone from replying. For any tweet like this, anyone who doesn’t fall within the permitted group will see the reply button greyed out on the tweet.

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Note that this won’t stop anyone from quote-tweeting, retweeting, liking or seeing the tweets in question. Susanne Xie, Twitter’s director of product management, dared anyone who has the feature to “host a debate on the benefits of pineapple on pizza (#TeamPineapple) with fellow pizza pals.” Holy cow, Susanne, I only want to tease people who can’t reply, not drive them into nuclear meltdown.

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There’s an obvious benefit, in that it’ll help you limit the tweet and subsequent discussion to a list of people who will add something — instead of, say, the people who respond to every Twitter update by begging for an edit button despite Jack Dorsey himself saying it ain’t gonna happen. Presumably this is part of Twitter’s initiative to help people control their conversations. Last year, they rolled out a feature that lets you hide replies to your tweets, so this is another form of the same kind of moderation.

It’s still a test, obviously, so only a small group of people have access to the feature right now. But those who do… oh boy, are they abusing it.

That’s just mean, Lil Nas X.

Jason, you are playing with fire here.

Okay, I admit Yashar is right about all of this — except the banana bread. What kind of monster…?

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