For some years now, many users on Twitter may have felt uncomfortable expressing themselves freely on the platform for fear of being attacked by other users, who rely on the anonymity provided by user accounts, for various reasons.
With this in mind, Twitter has been working to offer a series of mechanisms to control the conversations that users initiate on its platform, adding from today, in an official way, the function of limiting responses.
As we have already told you, this is a function that was introduced at the beginning of the year, and whose tests started last May, and extended a few days ago to all iOS users.
Now, gradually, Twitter users will start having this feature both through the official Twitter application for Android and iOS platforms, and also in its web version. At the moment, the Twitter client TweetDeck will not support this feature.
As we have already mentioned, the platform will offer us three options to choose from according to the users that we will allow to respond to our conversations: Everyone (which is the default), users we are following, and users we mention in the tweet. Those who are left out of the participation process, according to our choice, will see the option of creating responses somewhat diminished as an indicator.
Although Twitter has been characterized by allowing public conversations, this is not always possible due to the existence of users who are only dedicated to attacking, and this new control mechanism aims to avoid abusive or even offensive comments.
According to Twitter’s evidence:
People facing abuse find this setting useful; those who have submitted abuse reports are 3 times more likely to use this setting But more significant is the following fact:
It’s a new method of blocking noise: 60% of the people who used it during the test did not use Mute or Block. The change could lead to more meaningful conversations on Twitter. Those who wish to disagree with a tweet always have the option to retweet it by leaving an additional comment. Based on Twitter’s experience in recent tests:
You can still share different opinions with Retweets with comments, which sometimes reach a larger audience than the original Tweet. Several times, we saw more I like and seen in a Retweet with commentary than in the original Tweet, even though the author of the original Tweet had more followers. The only thing left is that the new feature is coming, so the best option, in case of using the Twitter app, is to have it totally updated.