Twitter is making some changes to their app, and now they’re give a making over to their ‘Conversations’ feature. The change their making seemingly makes conversation threads easier to read, understand, and join after users apparently complained about it being hard to differentiate earlier. Now, replies from accounts you follow will be shown directly under the original tweet, and threaded replies will show a line drawn next to it to show the conversation, and who’s replying to who.
I mean, they sort of did this before already, and the one visual they gave doesn’t really give me much of an understanding on why this will make it easier to see replies. Seems simple enough to me already? This sort of segmenting is reminiscent of Reddit style threads, and that confuses more than any other form of reply system around. The problem this makeover solves is that the app will now list responses from tweets on a certain thread and will differentiate between a normal tweet and one which was a reply to another tweet.
We’ve given conversations a makeover on iOS. When people you follow are in a conversation, you’ll see their replies in a new way in your Home timeline.
This new layout makes it easier to see who's replying to who so you can join in on relevant conversations. pic.twitter.com/xNmnAtQFeI
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) January 31, 2020
The update will firstly be available to iOS devices for now, but they do say in their own thread that they won’t be ‘abandoning’ Android users. So, we have that to look forward to, I guess?
We aren’t Android abandoners! This new reply layout will be coming to Android very soon.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) January 31, 2020
Apparently this will make it easier to “join in on relevant conversations”, and I find that hard to believe because Twitter threads and replies are usually a bunch of nonsense. Well, most of the time anyway. I guess this is their answer to making their platform more engaging? It was plenty engaging beforehand anyway, but hopefully this brings about a new look that at least makes it look a bit more modern.
