People hold conversations on Twitter using two distinct ways: On the timeline and on the DM. The timeline is open and people can see you chatting with other people, if you have mutual follows or they happen to see the tweet.
Well, Twitter wants to somehow ruin all that with new privacy controls where you can have a conversation with exactly who you want.
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1263145271946551300
In the new system, all you have to do is compose your tweet and @mention the people you want to talk to. Tap the new permission settings where you can control who replies on the tweet. The options include everybody, people you follow or only people you mention.
The interesting bit is that anyone can view and like your conversation but only the people you invited can reply.
This could be geared for those situations where you are talking to a specific group of people and you wouldn’t want interference from other people. It also can be viewed as a way to have specific discussions with a subset of your followers which can be easier to track.
I’m actually curious to see how this will be accepted by the general public and whether it will feel like you are forming cliques on the timeline.
Twitter says that they are testing this feature with a small percentage of their users globally so you might see this feature pop up on your feed.
This follows their big move last week where they made the famous Quoted Replies Bot redundant by rolling out a way to view quoted retweets on the iOS app.
