Twitter announced the ability to control your replies a while ago on iOS to a few users globally. Well, now it has been implemented on Android.
Twitter announced that they have rolled out the conversation settings to all users globally. “Starting today, everyone will be able to use these settings so unwanted replies don’t get in the way of meaningful conversations,” the company said in a post.
This is how it works on Android. Before you tweet, choose who you can reply to your specific tweet. There are three options that are available. Everyone is the standard and default setting. Only people you follow is quite self explanatory and only people you mention. Tweets that are set to the latter settings will be labelled and the reply icon will be grayed out for people who can’t reply. However, people who can’t reply will still be able to view, retweet, share and like these tweets.
Twitter has learnt a lot from the test
Twitter has learnt a lot from them testing this feature for the past few weeks. They say that people have used it host interviews, share what’s on your mind and make announcements. Apparently the settings help some people feel safer and could lead to more ‘meaningful’ conversations.
Twitter also shared interesting stats about the features. The settings prevented an average of three potentially abusive replies. However, they still added only one potentially abusive retweet with comment. Also, people who submitted abuse reports are three times more likely to use these settings. Twitter also found out that it has become a new way to block noise. Apparently 60% of people who used this did not use the mute or block function.
This feature has also become an unofficial behavioral study for Twitter in a way. their research shows people understand replies are limited in these tweets. However, people more frequently looked for additional commentary when replies are limited. The retweets with comments timeline was visited 4x more with this setting turned on. Twitter also (unsurprisingly) realized that differing views via quote retweets get more reach than the original tweet.
Twitter says that in the next few months, they are planning to add an option to invite more people to the conversation after its starts. They also promise to add the ability to clear notifications for when you’re invited to join a conversation using these settings.
