Twitter to add “conversation participants” setting to limit who can reply to your tweets

[xeni]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/08/twitter-to-add-conversation.html

“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.”

[scottslemmons]

Twitter users: “Please ban the fucking Nazis, Jack.”
Twitter: “Here’s a new feature protecting Nazis from rude conversations!”

[p96]

Will that apply to politicians?

[macbot]

I’m sure president Drumpfy McAdderall will find this feature very handy.

[Pensketch]

You have faith he will be able to figure out the settings. I have hope fiddling with it will keep him busy until he’s a footnote in history.

[alahmnat]

So far I’ve seen a lot of people dunking on this because it’ll mean tighter echo chambers or an inability to speak truth to power. I gotta say though, no powerful person on Twitter has ever been driven to change their mind by getting Ratio’d. As examples: Donald Trump is still the president despite truth being spoken to him with what I have to assume is extreme regularity, and David Brooks just left the platform but continues to have his views published on it because he is paid obscene amounts of money to write for the New York Times, which dutifully tweets them out every week. As for “correcting” propaganda and false statements, nobody who follows a liar is going to click into an individual tweet to view the replies anyway, and Twitter already gives authors the ability to hide replies they don’t like.

There are a lot of people on Twitter who seem to feel like they have a right to yell at total strangers for any reason (or no reason) en masse. That’s not healthy for the long-term life of the platform, and giving people control over who they choose to interact with is not “cowardice” or “censorship”.

Honestly, this is probably the least-worst idea the company has had in years (which is really saying something). Now, if they’d also put back the control that lets you remove people from a reply thread just because someone @'d them at some point earlier on, that would be fabulous.

[sluggo]

Can Twitter add the reverse? An “Anti-Follow”, where the more people who choose that on another user’s account reduces the likelihood that that account’s tweets will be seen by their followers or anyone else?

Seems like that would do more good.

[HMSGoose]

So they’re going after the “group text chain” market. Given the prevalence of in-jokes I hear about people’s dynamic and perpetual group text chains, seems like a reasonably fruitful arena to try to poke your ads into.