Twitter is making its response-limiting feature available to all users starting today, and it’s for real this time: You can finally say goodbye to the answers guys. The director of the product management company, Suzanne Xie, wrote in a published blog post on Tuesday that the feature is part of the platform’s efforts to give people more control over their conversations on the platform.
“Sometimes people are more comfortable talking about what’s happening when they can choose who can respond,” Xie said in the post, adding that Twitter has seen people use the settings to have conversations that were not before possible were. “From today, anyone will be able to use these settings so that unwanted answers get in the way of meaningful conversations.”
Here’s how the feature works. Before sending a tweet, users will have three options to choose who can reply to: everyone, whatever the default setting is, only people who follow the users, or only people who mention the user in the tweet . If you select a setting other than the default, the reply icon will turn gray for anyone who is unable to reply. And even if they can’t reply, other Twitter users can still retweet, comment, share or like the tweet in question.
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Xie writes in the blog post that Twitter’s research shows that people who had access to the limited responses tweeted more pleasantly and were more protected against spam and abuse, and did not lead to an increase in unwanted instant messaging. And it’s another way to block sound, Twitter found; 60 percent of the people who used the settings did not use the mute or block options of the platform during the test period.
Twitter has been experimenting with the limited response feature since May, and last week shoved an update to the iPhone version of its mobile app that made it look like the general rollout was already in place. However, it raised a false alarm – Twitter said it was pushing the release notes by mistake, the company said.
Whether restricting responses to tweets actually improves conversation on Twitter remains to be seen, but the company says some users have used the settings to have more sensitive conversations about political and social issues. “People share more of their thoughts – weighing these settings on topics like Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 is on average longer than those who do not use these settings,” the blog post states. And “various views” can still be shared via the retweet with option for comment / quote tweet, so the reply guys can just be the quote guys.
