Twitter To Experiment With Allowing Users To Select Who Can Reply To Tweets

Depending on who you ask, replies are either the lifeblood or scourge of Twitter. While discussion is certainly one of the main draws of Twitter, there's no doubting that trolls, reply guys and other nuisances can be a frustrating side effect of the overall experience. Faced with this issue, Twitter has announced plans to allow users to limit who can reply to their tweets.

At CES Tuesday, Twitter Director of Project Management Suzanne Xie announced that the site will soon include a new setting called "Conversation Participants," which will allow users to choose who can interact with their tweets before they post it. There will be four choices: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.” "Global" means anyone can reply to a tweet, "Group" means for people you follow and mention, "Panel" means only people specifically mentioned in the tweet, and "Statement" means nobody can reply.

Xie specifically mentioned The Ratio in her explanation for why Twitter would be experimenting with the feature. “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,” she said.

While on the surface, the new feature seems to have good intentions, some have noted that limiting replies could exacerbate Twitter's problem with the spread of misinformation. Responding to a reporter who asked about this, Xie said that the "quote-tweet" feature could be a possible solution, but overall the issue will be something Twitter analyzes as they experiment with the feature over the coming year.

Twitter users were unimpressed with the announcement, as is their wont.

Others, however, were excited to see the change. Notably, those excited seemed to be the type of people who have had to deal with lots of replies in the past.

This feature will revolutionize Twitter and clean it up. No longer will trolls be able to hijack someone’s feed to spew their nonsense. They will have to rely on their own feed (usually less than 50 followers). Bravo @Twitter https://t.co/1O59B2Q8jo

— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) January 8, 2020

yes we are finally getting a native "don't @ me" feature on twitter dot com this is so amazing and good don't @ me https://t.co/4mKu8dhX6D

— Joshua Byrd (@phocks) January 8, 2020

Time will tell if the feature, much like Twitter itself, will be a force for good or evil.