Twitter is Currently Working On a Solution That Makes It Easy to Follow Conversations

Twitter is doubling efforts to make its platform easier to use for both old and new users as the social media company just opened applications for its new testing program.

https://twitter.com/berge31/status/1098343068376416256

Reports about potential new features on Twitter began making the rounds in January. Twitter introduced the “original tweeter” label that makes it easy for users to identify tweets made by a user who originally started a thread.

But now, TechCrunch reports that Twitter is looking to test important new features that will make it easy for users to follow conversations within threads and replies.

The platform is looking to introduce colour-coded replies and will also hide engagement features such as “likes” and “retweets”.

So tweet replies will look sort of like Direct Messages. The plan is to simplify the look and feel to make it easier to follow conversations.

This looks like a pretty interesting solution for a lingering issue.

For a long time, Twitter has been a hard place to follow conversations between two people. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey himself admitted that following conversations between two people is very “hard”.

Unlike Facebook and other social platforms, Twitter is a notoriously difficult environment to follow conversations. With algorithms sorting the order of replies and different users’ threads running into one another, Twitter users, both old and new, can easily get confused.

https://technext.ng/2019/01/24/twitter-is-testing-a-new-original-tweeter-label-to-make-it-easier-to-follow-threads/

The use of Hashtags don’t help either. Although hashtags help to sort conversations, they are not enough to narrow them down.

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey got to witness this first hand recently. While doing a tweet-based interview with the co-founder of Recode, Kara Swisher, users found it difficult to follow both questions and the responses. Despite the use of a hashtag, it was still too easy for thousands of tweets with the same hashtag to swarm up and hide the real conversation.

1. We have evolved our polices.
2. We have prioritized proactive enforcement to remove burden from victims
3. We have given more control in product (like mute of accounts without profile pics or associated phone/emails)
4. Much more aggressive on coordinated behavior/gaming

— jack⚡️ (@jack) February 12, 2019

The only way out was to check their individual pages to see what was going on.

At the end of the interview, jack tweeted, “Need to make this feel a lot more cohesive and easier to follow.”

And that’s exactly what the company is doing with the opening of its beta program.

The program is opened to Japanese and English speakers, and will help Twitter test the new features easily.