Twitter on this day made an announcement pertaining to the new feature of hiding replies which will be opened to to a global audience today. The feature is one of the biggest thing on Twitter after the introduction of the Retweet feature.
This feature is designed to give the Twitter user complete control over replies to his or her tweet. This feature has been Twitter’s more controversial features since its start. Though the feature does not let any replies to be deleted, it only lets user to hide replies. With this features, harsh replies to tweets and other disagreement can easily be minimized.
The moral behind the feature is that online civility is promoted due to the fact that people who are aware of this feature will minimize disrespect.
The feature as well has its downside. It may also serve as a means of silencing critics and fact dispute.
The feature is reported to have been tested in Canada in July as well as in the U. S. and Japan last month on both web and mobile.
At the launch of the feature, Twitter got insights on how users made use of it such as hiding replies the find annoying, irrelevant or off-topic instead of using harsher features such as block or mute.
Users have reported that though hiding replies that are irrelevant, they were also afraid of retaliation because the icon remains visible. Twitter are still considering how to rectify this.
Another downside of the feature as reported by users is the large number of notifications they got when a tweet with hidden replies was encountered.
